Double battery capacity

[E-cite]

OK so I purchased 2 2013 Brammo Empulse units.  One which is like new with 3400 miles has been rebuilt as a reverse trike (zener-ecite) the 2nd is a damaged one I purchased just for the battery pack. My plan is to pull the batteries out of the 2nd and install them in parallel with the battery on the trike. I can see how the power out will work fine however am unsure as to how charging and balancing will be achieved. Any incite on this would be appreciated.

[E-cite]

Update - I have the batteries out of the crashed unit and ready to install. Pretty simple setup as all I need to do is daisy chain the logic cables then hook all the batteries in series. Once done I just parallel this battery pack to the original and I have double the storage. It appears each battery module is 14.7 volts and there are 7 in the series for approx 102.9 volt total

[Brammofan]

Sounds good! Please continue to update us and include photos, if possible.

[electric 2 wheeler]

Interesting Project ! The complete battery pack charges to a bit over 116 volts. Your plan should work but you won't have any BMS functions except possibly balancing in the individual battery modules. The modules have electronics inside which communicate to the BMS module through the communication cables that connect all the modules. You probably would want some easy way to check the voltages of the 7 individual battery modules. Make  SURE that the bikes battery pack and the extra pack are within a volt of each other or you could  have a  large inrush current from the more highly charged pack into the lower charged pack. I have burned my fingerers, flashed my eyes and vaporized a couple of 50 amp Anderson connectors by forgetting to do this once. Oh, and molten metal sprays out!
 If the extra pack is wired in Parallel with the main pack it will charge with the main pack. There are a few buts of course. There will be no BMS function while charging or discharging and even though you can read the module voltage of each of the 7 modules there will be no way to measure the 4 individual cell groups inside each module but they should stay balanced for a long time and the balancers inside might work even though the internal electronics are not powered up. There is a green led on the top of each battery that flashes when the bike is either turned on, charging, or when the key is in the park position. I have always assumed that they mean the BMS and battery modules are on and communicating. That is not going to happen without the BMS hooked up. All that said, I run My Vectrix without a BMS and have ridden 4000 miles that way and the Chevy Volt cells I installed are still well balanced. You have to check them once in a while to be sure. Hope this helps.

[E-cite]

I have enough logic cable to continue the daisy chain on the bms portion so I am assuming the bms will function on all 14 battery packs. And yes I am aware of the issues with hooking the packs together for the first time and will try to get them both discharged to the same level.

thanks for the input

[electric 2 wheeler]

It will be interesting to know what the bike does with two sets of CAN signals from two battery packs. Keep us posted and I would love to see some pics of your trike conversion! Thanks for posting, this is interesting stuff.

[E-cite]

Batteries are in however i need 2 24 inch logic cables so I have to build them or find a source. The originals are no longer available however I can find alternate 8 pin cables but need a responds from the distributor regarding price. I am unsure how the system will handle the parallel battery pack but we will see. The batteries are 100% dead so I have to also wake them up. Here is the trike where it stands today - https://endeavortrikes.com/2020-2/


Update - I was checking the batteries wrong, 65 volts so I have a winner

[electric 2 wheeler]

Beautiful !
When I built my extra 18650 cell batteries I had used cells and didn't use any cells that were below 2.0 volts per cell and they were all fine so at 65 volts that would be about 2.3 each so they should be good. I would think you should have around 140 mile range. I wonder if it would be possible to use the charger from the scrap bike also for 6.6 KW charging?. The trike really gives the room for a serious amount of extra battery capacity. I dream of an electric touring bike but you can only add so much weight and bulk to an Empulse. I have toyed with the idea of transplanting the motor from the Empulse into a larger frame touring motorcycle or scooter frame.

[E-cite]

The good part is I have all the parts from the donor bike like motor and controller etc except for the dash controls which were damaged. I think I will have about 115-125 hwy range and close to 250 or so in town which is good. I have no doubt using 18650 battery packs would add another 100 miles as the ones I am using are pretty outdated. Perhaps when Tesla come out with the new ultra batteries it will be a good time to upgrade. I should have the logic cables Tuesday and have a design in mind for the final look. This was my very first prototype I built in 2008 and I think the style will fit in with the new Zener-ecite. Red and flat black is the plan.

[HadesOmega]

Wow cool, would be nice if you can get a Yamaha Niken so you'd still be able to lean with 3 wheels.

The good thing about the trike is you can probably put the batteries pretty down low

[E-cite]

Only problem is a leaning trike is a dumb idea. A lot of people have built them only to find out there is absolutely no advantage and many disadvantages. A non-leaning trike will generally out perform most leaning tour and cruiser bikes and the one brand leaning trike. I did a lot of research around this subject and opted not to venture down that dead end road.

[E-cite]

OK so all the batteries are in and hooked up. The added 7 cells are in series and showing 108 vdc same as the stock units. I have the logic cables all hooked up with 14 in series with a terminator at the end. That's the good now here is the sort of bad. With the logic cable installed I get a B40 error and am dead in the water. Also when plugging into the charger it reads 4893 amps charging so obviously the BMS is confused and not programmed to accept the extra battery count. If I unhook the logic cable from the new 7 it boots up perfect and charger shows 6 hour to charge as is perfectly normal. So going forward I will simply forget the logic cable and hope the batteries come into a suto balance of sorts. Here is a video of what has been done so far. You can skip ahead as this video also shows my Valkyrie prototype in the beginning. I will be working on exterior skins and the new hard bags I just purchased for this new SportTrike.

[electric 2 wheeler]

Great video! Looking at the Brammo wiring diagram it appears that the logic cable is the only connection the batteries have to the bike except for the plus and minus battery cables. What would happen if you unplugged the original pack logic cable and just plugged in the other pack logic cable? You might already know this but there are a couple of different screens on the instrument display that you can access by holding down the two buttons at the same time. The first screen gives batt voltage and high and low cell voltages plus a few more things and a little indicator that shows the balancing between the 7 modules. So you can't see individual cell voltages but all other cells would be in between those two values so good enough. It would give you some idea of what the health of the second pack is like and you could use the balance function.  You could even possibly figure a way to switch back and forth.

[E-cite]

From what I can tell the logic cable is a canbus connection to the computer which is used for display and information. Each module seems to have it's own BMS so the packs should balance. I have on module that is bad and swelled to the point it cracked the case so that one is history. I purchase 4 leaf batteries which will replace a pair of brammo packs which will get me to a good balance again. We will see

[electric 2 wheeler]

Bummer that the modules were bad ! Mixing cells of different ages/capacities in series without a BMS for charging and discharging is dangerous. You would need to monitor their voltages carefully especially when charging. Good luck!