Project Details
- Below is a picture of our Charge Cart. It is a cart that we use to safely store and transport our car's 588-volt battery. As the name implies, it also manages our charging process.
In order to charge the car's battery, we must first be able to close our battery's insulation relays. The problem here is that these are powered by our car's safety circuit, which requires the car to be turned on and in an operational state. This is not ideal when charging a nearly 600-volt battery.
To solve this, I designed a PCB for the charge cart to bypass this safety circuit. In addition, I have also added a USB-to-UART conversion circuit to the board, allowing us to easily view the voltages, temperatures and passive balancing status of all 140 series groups in our battery in real-time from any laptop.
This real-time monitoring allows us to catch and prevent any strange battery behaviour that may arise while charging before anything damaging can occur to our pack.
