Beginner's Guide to ElectroDacus

[Oberon Robinson]

Hi all, I've been designing a mobile solar system with ElectroDacus for a van build, and working my way up the learning curve. Since investing the time to figure it all out, I thought I would write up what I've learned into a Beginner's Guide to ElectroDacus to save others some of the trouble, and hopefully save Dacian some time answering questions as well.

If anyone feels like reading it over and giving feedback, I would appreciate it. I still have some sections to finish, and plan to add more pictures and example circuit diagrams. But please let me know if I've badly screwed anything up!

- Oberon

[Charlie G]

Awesome Stuff and great efforts. 

[Bernd]

Hi Oberon,

excellent work. A big thank you for your investment!!! This will help a lot for so many people. 

I would love to assist "the electrodacus project" as well. I think a youtube beginner video will help as well....

Can we have a quick chat/call/zoom or whatever you like?

Bernd

[Dave McCampbell]

Hi Oberon.  Excellent work!  We also have been working on a beginner's guide to Electrodacus from the perspective of a cruising boat installation.  Ours is about as far along as yours.  Maybe we should combine efforts.  There are already several Utubes, some better than others, but none covering all that needs to be covered in order to do a best practices install.

[Machiru]

This is fantastic for beginners like myself. Thanks for the time and effort to produce this guide. Greetings from beginner in Liverpool UK 🇬🇧 

[Doug Wolfe]

Nice resource!  May consider beefing up section 8.1 to add detail for the power and ground wires.  If someone is using a breakout board or other type of connector, need to ensure to run #1 and #12 all the way to the BAT vs. having them combined with 2 and 10/11 at a breakout board for proper individual cell voltage detection. Appreciate your note about keeping wires in order, I can verify that you will cause damage if wires are out of order (I burned up resistors on cell 7 because I had some out of order, silly mistake)

[Oberon Robinson]

Thanks everyone.  Bernd and Dave, I'd be delighted to collaborate!

Doug I agree, 8.1 needs more material, and good point about wires #1 & 12.  I just got to the point where I didn't want to keep writing in a vacuum so I thought I would post what I had so far and see if what I was doing would be useful to people.

I'd love to put this all up on a wiki somewhere so others can add and edit material.  I'll look into wiki hosting options.

[Acercanto]

Man, this is great material! Thanks for putting it out there for us all!

The self-power lines are actually 1 and 10, not 12, fyi.

Acercanto - learning as he goes

[Center Right Proud American]

> The self-power lines are actually 1 and 10, not 12, fyi.

Are you sure of that?    I am pretty sure that Dacian said 1 is the negative self power and 11 & 12 are the positive self power.   10 is a sense/balance line.

[Center Right Proud American]

I found this quote from Dacian in another thread:

" Like pin 1 is to power the SBMS internal electronics and pin 2 is to measure the cell 1 negative terminal if you combine this then the voltage drop across the wire will produce errors in measurement and you do not want that. Same with pin 10 that is sense wire and pin 11, 12 that are for self power."

https://groups.google.com/g/electrodacus/c/WsQQU-z6ku0/m/IkZvIPMMAgAJ

On Friday, March 12, 2021 at 2:53:26 PM UTC-8 Acercanto wrote:

[Acercanto]

Ah! Thank you for correcting me. That will come in handy tomorrow as that's the next step for me.

Acercanto

[Center Right Proud American]

You may want to check this out:
https://diysolarforum.com/resources/electrodacus-sbms0-i-o-summary-chart.112/

[Peter Kuczynski]

Hi Oberon,

please consider adding this link to your guide, very nice work BTW.

https://www.suncalc.org

Cheers!

Peter

[Chris Card]

Very good guide - I’m sure if enough people chip on with comments and corrections it could become even more useful.

Section 1, point 4 - if I’m not mistaken, the SBMS0 does not offer active cell balancing, but rather passive cell balancing. 

[Bernd]

I´ve checked my purchases in the past and here are the amazon ASIN numbers.

crimper 4-70mm 10to      B07VBMMDDT

shunt 300A 75mV         B006Z954QA

wekon adapter              B082CJ8YD5

security glasses            B085XPGRRW

amp meter                    B07Z398YWF

breaker                         B07Z65D2ZC

solar cable                    B07S75JGTD

m4 screws & nuts         B07P1744WL

DC switch                     B07XTDSD4B

breaker                         B074FV2L4N

studs                             B07S3VMFYS

mc4 crimper                  B083FRDB8X

power supply                 B01M0APZK3

bus bar                          B07DN8KMTC

bus bar                          B07GGZL9DF

zange                           B002BDNL4Q

breaker                        B07P19T5S4

water heater                B01EHWIXPA

cable ring                    B06XR7CZHW

shunt 100A 75mV       B081JMSBNB

24V -> 12V power      B01KQWWVTY

crimper                       B07NRYF3MZ

crimper                       B073TZ5BBG

All are amazon and I hope that this is the best way for all DIY´er all over the world to find a quick and fast delivery. as missing tools are not helpful :-)

Fell free to sort the bad ones out, not all are verified or tested but most of these are good quality and worked fine for me.

Feel free to add better stuff and esp, bus bars for cells are a hard to find topic (at least still for me)....

 

[Dave McCampbell]

Oberon.  Just finished reading through your Beginners' Guide.  Very well done and organized.  We can probably add to this eqpt list.  You including this in your guide?   And we have several trusted sources for cells.  Wife Sherry will add info on Rasberry Pie and Node Red to our guide soon. Will get our beginners' guide rough up for you to look at later this week.  We are still working feverishly on our install and new cell top balancing.  Dave 

[Oberon Robinson]

Thanks for everyone's input.  I haven't had time to work on this over the last couple of days, but I've added in all the suggestions here and I'll share an updated version shortly.  Still looking for a public wiki where this could be hosted, does anyone know of a good site?  I'm looking at WikiDot or possibly a self-hosted option.

Bernd, great to have your component list.  Dacian had suggested having a number of example systems with component lists - it would be great to include a number of confirmed-working circuit diagrams, and I'll be adding my own when it's ready as well.  If anyone else wants to share theirs I'd be happy to include it!

Dave, thanks for your kind comments, and looking forward to seeing your version - the Raspberry Pi and Node-RED info will be great to have included.  let me know if you or Sherry have any ideas on how best to collaborate.  I tried uploading my version to Google Docs but it totally borked the formatting, so I'm looking for a better option.

[Tom Kühne]

Hi Oberon
thxU for the Guide will read it asap

[Dacian Todea]

Oberon,

I see your document seems to be popular or people are just polite :) 

Someone mentioned recently the  http://dccwiki.com/  but I have no experience with any Wiki and he said is the same software as Wikipedia.

The diagrams I wanted to have as example will have been designed from scratch by me based on most popular components that are easily available. I just do not have the time to create those as it will take me quite a few days probably a full week to be able to make that and currently I do not have that time.

[Oberon Robinson]

Dacian, DCCWiki uses WikiMedia, which I am strongly considering, although that is a self-hosting option.  I do have web hosting space that I could put it on, ideally with its own domain name.  Or another option is that it could be added to electrodacus.com if that's something that you would be open to?  I don't want to step on your toes in any way, just trying to help and save you as much time as possible, especially from answering the same questions many times that could be covered in a user guide.  I have built a lot of websites professionally, so whichever way it works best, I can assure you that it will be done well.

[Dacian Todea]

I have not even checked the dccwiki page so did not know that it is self-hosting. Self-hosting will likely be more of a pain (thus the reason I use google for the forum) and there will always be updates to deal with on self hosting all sorts of incompatibilities and security issues that I will prefer not to deal with as that means time.

You also need to consider that SBMS is a low volume product hundreds of people have this so at most there will be a few hundreds of people benefiting from all this effort and most of them will already understand how it works and for them the user manual is more than enough then they install it and likely will not care about it for at least 10 years if it was well installed.

[Cem Netherlands]

Hello Oberon

Thank you for guide , good effort. 

I am trying to find out if you can use Google Drive for Hosting ? I created a new folder and shared it with Electrodacus Groups.

But i am not allowed.

Maybe Dacian can  create a folder in google drive and invite google groups like attached?

[Dacian Todea]

Cem,

I have not used google drive for anything before and so I'm not familiar with and do not know what the limitations are.  Also not sure how something where anyone will have edit access will work (maybe it will become a big mess).

My google drive storage is always almost full currently at 88% and all of that due to emails (I needed to delete old emails quite a few times to not exceed the limit).  I was even happy to purchase extra space and I actually did so about 3 months ago before I realized I can not pay in advance only every month and so I canceled immediately after as that is not acceptable to me. Risk is to high that a payment will no go trough (for any reason) and I can not react in time and I can lose all data.

If there was an option to pay at least for 1 or 2 years in advance as I can do for my website then that will have been great but seems it is not the case.

[Barry Timm]

Great effort, thank you!

I am hoping that a section may be added for options to externally monitor the SBMS0, for example, on a large 10" Android tablet, that includes some missing data such as the running SOC% along with load and pv charting. That would be awesome!

[Bernd]

I have a running iobroker environment that uses the parser adapter to read the rawdata page of sbms0 via wifi every x seconds and stores all single values in individual iobroker data objects.

This gives options for using KNX, telegram and lots of other stuff....

[Paul Rimmer]

Would github be a good place to host this information?  It is free, widely used and has good support for wiki type projects.

https://guides.github.com/features/wikis/

Cheers,

Paul

[Dave McCampbell]

Hi Oberon.  I don't think using something where others can make changes to your guide is a good idea.  There are too many differing opinions as to what works and what does not for that.  I think it would end up a mess.  I think you should retain control over what is included and what is not, with Dacian's concurrence of course.  We don't want to be leading others astray with information that conflicts with what is on this forum or Dacian's manuals.  But elaboration of some of the finer points of use and installation and links to equipment, tools, and additional information sources like what is in the IO Summary, is helpful to many.  And the real value of this is having links to all the reliable information on this system in one place. 

My wife, Sherry, is a computer programmer and web designer and we are both writers.  We have a very large website for our cruising and boat mechanics information that has been up for years and will continue to be up for years to come.  We will be placing our installation experience information and photos, much of it specific to boats, on it.  We would be happy to host your Beginners' Guide there also as a document on a separate ElectroDacus page.  You would provide the updates and we would post them to that page.  We have experience with this as we host about 20 cruising guides as pdfs that are often updated by other cruisers, but with us making the entries.  If you are interested in this option and want to have a look at the website it is here:  http://www.svsoggypaws.com   See the Files section off the Home page for the cruising guide examples.

[Dave McCampbell]

www.svsoggypaws website, mentioned in my last post, down as of yesterday.  Ready Hosting currently working on their web hosting server problem.  Will advise when back up.

[Oberon Robinson]

Here's a more updated version of the Beginner's Guide to ElectroDacus. Please use this one if you downloaded the last version — there were some errors that were corrected, as well as more detail and info added.

I think I've incorporated all of the feedback I've received. Let me know if you see anything I've missed or got wrong.

Still to do: add more pictures and diagrams, and add info on sourcing components.

I've had several people suggest not having the document on a wiki — and since it was proving to be complicated to set up anyway, I've dropped the idea, at least for the moment.  I'd still love to have other contributions and collaborations though, so please send any ideas my way!  More circuit diagrams would be also great to include.

Barry, good idea to add external monitoring setup.  I don't yet have any experience with this, so if anyone else can chime in, I'd be happy to include it.

Paul, I looked into github's wiki pages, but their formatting is pretty basic and without cross-references and other features as far as I can tell.  Good idea though!

Bernd, I included your list of Amazon ASINs, I haven't yet gone through them or created links.  One of the challenges is that Amazon seems to give the same product different ASINs on their different country sites.  So maybe just the brand & model is better.

Dave, looking forward to checking out your website when it's back up.  Let me know if I can do anything to help - I've been a professional web designer for 20 years, among some of the other hats I wear. :)  Also, would you like to add your & Sherry's Raspberry Pi and Node-RED content into this document?

Thanks everyone!

[Jhon]

When I was about 12, I got a math teacher who was able to explain things to the class in different ways and from that I learned that our brains are wired differently, an explanation that seems easy to understand for one person, is confusing for another person and visa versa.  It helped me later in life when I got an introduction to electronics class and I couldn't follow the teacher.  I ended up buying a book that explained things in the way I was thinking.

While Dacian is extremely helpful, and I love the products, I somehow have a hard time understanding the manual. This guide while it provides much of the same information, is great for me and the way I "think".  (Other people might prefer the manual, or even another way to explain things)  So thank you for the write up, it is certainly helpful and is giving me new ideas.