Elithion BMS

[David Hale]

hi Peter, I see on your evalbum page that you got rid of your Elithion BMS because you "couldn't stop having communication faults". I'm experiencing continuous communication faults as well, and wondered if you could elaborate on your situation.

So in my case, I get an error (which stops the car! Once rather dangerously as I was driving on the freeway where there was no shoulder and suddenly the BMS faults and shuts the drive off!). When I connect a laptop the error is a communication fault. Sure enough, if I look at the LEDs on the cell boards, for the bank reporting the fault the LED heartbeat stops on a cell board (and none after that are blinking, either). I relocate that entire bank of cell boards to a different bank and it faults there, too, so it's not the communication cable between the controller and the bank. If I replace the first cell board that isn't blinking, that would correct the problem. Aha, a bad cell board. That was fine the first time. Then it happened again. The fifth time this happened I figured I was experiencing systematic cell board failure so I sent them all to Elithion. They found nothing wrong with any of them.

Any thoughts? Elithion says it could be noise, but that seems funny that it could be noisy on just one cell board in the middle of a bank, and also that the problem would follow that bank when I physically relocated it.

Thanks,

Dave