Solar Car Battery Testing System

[Daniel Cambron]

Greetings fellow solar car enthusiasts!

I wanted to let you all know about a Kickstarter project some current and former University of Kentucky Solar Car Team members are involved with. We’re in the process of creating a battery testing system for the 18650 form factor cells several teams are using these days. This is more than a piece of hardware; it’s a complete system designed to walk you through the entire process of configuring a custom electric vehicle battery pack. The system cycles cells, runs cycle tests to determine capacity, runs sinusoid and pulse tests to characterize impedance, and can estimate state-of-health when compared with benchmark values for a particular cell model. The user is provided a template to label cells, and after all cells have been tested and all data has been amassed, the system calculates the optimal battery pack configuration given weight and voltage constraints.

This system is something I wish I had the last time I was putting together a solar car battery pack, which is why I’ve teamed up with other solar car lovers to try and make this thing become a reality. In fact, the ultimate goal of our team is to become a holistic source that enables students and hobbyists to create complete, safe, and reliable EV battery packs that last for years.

One more thing--In the spirit of this community, we’re making all of our schematics and software open source so that you can tweak this product to meet your individual needs, and we’ll be glad to assist you in this effort, or help guide you to use the system to its fullest extents.

If you have questions or would like to know more, feel free to check out (and help fund!) the Kickstarter link below, or reach out to me directly.

http://kck.st/2eUyaAR

I look forward to working with this community to craft this product into something all of us could benefit from!

 

Best Regards,

Daniel Cambron

[Daniel Cambron]

All,

I want to thank you for your support in helping us successfully fund this Kickstarter campaign for the 'Batlab' 18650 battery characterization system! We've had a lot of good feedback from you all as well as hobbyists working with DIY Tesla Powerwalls. Thanks to user suggestions, we're now looking at supporting different cell form factors and also making some tweaks to increase our discharge current capability.

I'm sending out this note because the Kickstarter campaign ends in 12 hours, so if you are interested in this project, don't miss out on your chance to reserve yours with a $99 pledge! Let me know if you all have any questions!

Here's the link to the campaign: http://kck.st/2eUyaAR

Thanks!

Daniel Cambron

Former Univ of Kentucky Solar Car Team Lead

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