Hey guys!
So after doing some work to wake up the internal BMS of my scooter batteries, there's still the question about how to harvest these cells easily and safely, being that they are 40 premium Panasonic NCR18650BD battery cells per module. For easier access to the battery cells I recommend you buy the scooter battery modules without the aluminum enclosure.
All you need to do is remove the rubber that surrounds the module, which is not hard to do. You could even do it with your bare hands, without tools.
You just work your way all the way around removing the rubber from all the sides.
You want to get to the point where the you only have rubber around the individual cells.
You can remove the nickel stripping from here.
Then you need to remove the enclosure by spreading the sides apart, but because of the rubber compound it can be a little challenging, but not impossible.
To make this process much easier, use my old friend: leverage.
You can use 2 strong, long pieces of wood and add a pair of L-brackets to the sides so that you can screw them to the battery enclosure. The are screw holes on the enclosure edges.
Again, the longer the pieces of wood are the easier it will be to spread the casing open, because you'll have more leverage. Now slowly spread the casing open.
Now that the casing is separated, you should be able to pop out each cell from the remaining casing.
Once the battery cells are harvested you should have collected 40 premium Panasonic NCR18650BD battery cells! That's how you do it!
Now you can test the batteries or build whatever project you want with these premium Panasonic NCR18650BD cells!
Many of us will be using the battery modules with the aluminum enclosure to build our own DIY Powerwalls like this one, using little Arduino boards.
Some will use the modules without all the rubber and put them together to make a very compact and energy dense 4kWh 36V battery box. You can then add that battery to extend the power of emergency power devices like the Bluetti or EcoFlow batteries.
There you have it! Keep building and DIY-ing! Also, you check out how to harvest these cells more easily in my video.
1 comment
Jehu, firstly, thanks man for doing what you do. I picked up 2 of these enclosed units and tested them by charging them up. I got one unit to 40v, and connected my seeeduino w/voltage regulator and blue it out (I new this was a risk since my regulator was for 24-36v max—worked great when it was low on charge ;) ) Anyhow, not an issue for me I have more. So, I started charging up t he second, and its working as well. Here is the question though, now that they are both charged they both show 36-40vdc without any wakeup codes being sent and not plugged into the charger. Is that normal? Do you only need to pump the TX with the wake code if the pack had gone low power? I’ve done a lot of searching, and have not found that much out there. Do you have any more information or links to share? I’ll be adding information to my site once I get things more together so that the community can benefit. If you’re interested I can share a link once I have information about this project on it.