Alright we’ve got a brand new development to dive into here. Probably going to need some community help on this one for advice, but it’s quite intriguing.
My friend @ryan9921 decided to take on the task of converting another friend’s gokart from Yerf-Dog to electric.
http://www.yerf-dog.com/main_gokart.html
He texted me a few weeks ago and since then we have been working on getting components sorted out. We don’t know exactly which one of these it is, so that was unfortunate, but the components should work on most of them. One of our goals is to stay under 2k for the build. That being said, we need: ESC, Motor, pedal controller, BMS, charger, and batteries.
For the batteries, we decided to pick up a 144 pack of the SPIM08HP cells with the goal of making a 16s9p battery pack. This should be more than enough power for our goals.
For the ESC, Motor, and pedal controls, we picked up a kit from Aliexpress that had a combination of the motor, speed controller, and a pedal.
Normally they come with a twisty hand control but we were able to message the seller and they switched it to a pedal for us, pretty great! I think that the go kart frame probably has mechanical brakes in it still too so the combination should work out well.
For the BMS, I picked a smart bms from LLT Power. With the Bluetooth feature, it will be convenient to see the individual P group voltages without having to probe things. In addition we can place the temperature probe on the pack for a good readout. I picked a 16S 80A discharge one, we will be bypassing discharge because I don’t really feel like having to worry about overdoing the current.
To go along with the BMS, I searched around on their site for a bit to see if we could pick up a charger from the same company, but it seems like they don’t have any 16s chargers at the amperage we want. We want to have a 12-15A 16S charger, but they only have smaller amperage versions. There are a bunch of other voltages, even higher ones that have the right current reading, but no 16S. It is very confusing looking around for chargers because all of the different sites label their voltages differently. Sometimes 16s will be 67.2v, sometimes it will be 60v, you never really know.
I kind of came to the conclusion that I should be looking for a “60v” charger, but we are still on the search for it. I really would like to get a 15A or higher charger, the LTT Power BMS says it can do 15A “normal current” and 20A “max current” so I was aiming between there, maybe an 18A charger would be good, but we also don’t really want to spend $300 on a charger, so we will find a balance somehow.
Does anyone have suggestions on the charger?
my bad
I’d love to see the process if you do end up getting back to it