53kw CATL Upgrade on 2013 Leaf S

[Simon357]

Any news or still waiting?

The new Can Bridge arrived on Sunday, and I wired it in yesterday afternoon. For the moment, I have it taped to the plastic trim to the left of the manual e-brake. I need to 3D print a case for it (it is about 4X larger than traditional Can Bridge).

Upon installation, I had to use leafspy to clear the DTCs and the range immediately shot up to 185 miles at around 70%SOC (53kWh battery). After charging overnight, the range maxed out at 214 miles at 97.5%SOC. They said 4.03V is now the max voltage per cell.

Initial observations:
- There is a mosfet on the board that runs at 45C degrees. Seems pretty warm to me, but they said to check it again after a day or two to see if it settles down.
- LeafSpy is in a constant refresh every two seconds or so. It will disconnect and reconnect in an endless loop. You can still see the data, but if you are using it as a dashboard in your car, I think you would find that unusable. They said this is an electrical signal refresh...again, I'll see if that settles down in a few days.
- I was also told that the full charge mileage that is displayed will not change as the battery degrades since that is programmed into the board based on cell capacities. I am hoping it will correct itself as the car is driven as SOC goes down more quickly with more degraded battery. Time will tell.

My current cell deviation at full charge is 10mV after 6 months of usage.

I think there are trade offs between these two different Can Bridges. Knowing what I know now, I would have opted for getting the BMS reprogrammed. I assume I would have had to ship it to them and they would have sent it back with the batteries. There is also the consideration of the low balance current with these older BMSs.

From here, I plan to run the battery down as far as I can to see if/when turtle mode kicks in and see what the true real world range is.

Lastly, on a safety issue. The batteries are secured to a metal plate that is glued to the bottom of the original battery compartment. It is supposed to be a high strength bonding adhesive, but the worry wart in me can't help but think of that bond failing in a rollover crash and causing a fire. I do remember someone questioning the round spacers used to secure the battery under the car, I can say that they are still right and tight.

On a side note, I would say I am 10k total into this project. Assuming nothing changes from here, I would expect a good 10 years out of it which would be a great deal. That being said, you can get a 2023 Chevy Bolt EUV for about 15k+tax/title now. So if I had to make the choice to do it again, I would say no, I would just buy a newer used bolt or leaf. Also, if the time comes to sell this leaf, I think it would give most people a serious pause after disclosing what was done to it. Just food for thought.

 

[Simon357]

In your original comment, you said you purchased this from https://chuenergy.en.alibaba.com/ There is an almost identical website here https://augbattery.en.alibaba.com/ which is linked to Robert Lou here https://mynissanleaf.com/threads/sh...gy-battery-packs-is-it-real.34756/post-648641 who states that Robert Lou sold him one of these packs.

There is more along these lines, but overall it looks like a broad web presence coming from a a very narrow group of people.

And this gets around the turtling issues.

You may be able to fix this by getting a BMS from a 40 or 60 kwh Leaf, updating the current sensor and using a CAN bridge.

Definitely a good idea.

 

[denwood]

The new Can Bridge arrived on Sunday, and I wired it in yesterday afternoon. For the moment, I have it taped to the plastic trim to the left of the manual e-brake. I need to 3D print a case for it (it is about 4X larger than traditional Can Bridge).

Upon installation, I had to use leafspy to clear the DTCs and the range immediately shot up to 185 miles at around 70%SOC (53kWh battery). After charging overnight, the range maxed out at 214 miles at 97.5%SOC. They said 4.03V is now the max voltage per cell.

Initial observations:
- There is a mosfet on the board that runs at 45C degrees. Seems pretty warm to me, but they said to check it again after a day or two to see if it settles down.
- LeafSpy is in a constant refresh every two seconds or so. It will disconnect and reconnect in an endless loop. You can still see the data, but if you are using it as a dashboard in your car, I think you would find that unusable. They said this is an electrical signal refresh...again, I'll see if that settles down in a few days.
- I was also told that the full charge mileage that is displayed will not change as the battery degrades since that is programmed into the board based on cell capacities. I am hoping it will correct itself as the car is driven as SOC goes down more quickly with more degraded battery. Time will tell.

My current cell deviation at full charge is 10mV after 6 months of usage.

I think there are trade offs between these two different Can Bridges. Knowing what I know now, I would have opted for getting the BMS reprogrammed. I assume I would have had to ship it to them and they would have sent it back with the batteries. There is also the consideration of the low balance current with these older BMSs.

From here, I plan to run the battery down as far as I can to see if/when turtle mode kicks in and see what the true real world range is.

Lastly, on a safety issue. The batteries are secured to a metal plate that is glued to the bottom of the original battery compartment. It is supposed to be a high strength bonding adhesive, but the worry wart in me can't help but think of that bond failing in a rollover crash and causing a fire. I do remember someone questioning the round spacers used to secure the battery under the car, I can say that they are still right and tight.

On a side note, I would say I am 10k total into this project. Assuming nothing changes from here, I would expect a good 10 years out of it which would be a great deal. That being said, you can get a 2023 Chevy Bolt EUV for about 15k+tax/title now. So if I had to make the choice to do it again, I would say no, I would just buy a newer used bolt or leaf. Also, if the time comes to sell this leaf, I think it would give most people a serious pause after disclosing what was done to it. Just food for thought.

Ok, thanks for the update. We almost picked up a 2018 Bolt (with a brand new 62kWh pack and 8 year warranty) which are relatively good deals right now as they are making their way from GM buy-backs to dealers with new batteries. They are running around $20K CAD (14-50K USD) right now.

 

[Paul Deng]

The new Can Bridge arrived on Sunday, and I wired it in yesterday afternoon. For the moment, I have it taped to the plastic trim to the left of the manual e-brake. I need to 3D print a case for it (it is about 4X larger than traditional Can Bridge).

Upon installation, I had to use leafspy to clear the DTCs and the range immediately shot up to 185 miles at around 70%SOC (53kWh battery). After charging overnight, the range maxed out at 214 miles at 97.5%SOC. They said 4.03V is now the max voltage per cell.

Initial observations:
- There is a mosfet on the board that runs at 45C degrees. Seems pretty warm to me, but they said to check it again after a day or two to see if it settles down.
- LeafSpy is in a constant refresh every two seconds or so. It will disconnect and reconnect in an endless loop. You can still see the data, but if you are using it as a dashboard in your car, I think you would find that unusable. They said this is an electrical signal refresh...again, I'll see if that settles down in a few days.
- I was also told that the full charge mileage that is displayed will not change as the battery degrades since that is programmed into the board based on cell capacities. I am hoping it will correct itself as the car is driven as SOC goes down more quickly with more degraded battery. Time will tell.

My current cell deviation at full charge is 10mV after 6 months of usage.

I think there are trade offs between these two different Can Bridges. Knowing what I know now, I would have opted for getting the BMS reprogrammed. I assume I would have had to ship it to them and they would have sent it back with the batteries. There is also the consideration of the low balance current with these older BMSs.

From here, I plan to run the battery down as far as I can to see if/when turtle mode kicks in and see what the true real world range is.

Lastly, on a safety issue. The batteries are secured to a metal plate that is glued to the bottom of the original battery compartment. It is supposed to be a high strength bonding adhesive, but the worry wart in me can't help but think of that bond failing in a rollover crash and causing a fire. I do remember someone questioning the round spacers used to secure the battery under the car, I can say that they are still right and tight.

On a side note, I would say I am 10k total into this project. Assuming nothing changes from here, I would expect a good 10 years out of it which would be a great deal. That being said, you can get a 2023 Chevy Bolt EUV for about 15k+tax/title now. So if I had to make the choice to do it again, I would say no, I would just buy a newer used bolt or leaf. Also, if the time comes to sell this leaf, I think it would give most people a serious pause after disclosing what was done to it. Just food for thought.

Very nice for the details sharing!

Regarding to the BMS reprogramming,we are still on testing.They still have their own advantages and disadvantages,for saving clients time and money points,CAN Bridge 3.0 belongs to low cost and high-effciceny way to solve the problems.

Any way!Many thanks for sharing!

 

[Simon357]

Nice to see you here Paul. Paul represents the company I got this kit from. Definitely one of the best customer service experiences I have ever had. I don't think he sleeps.

 

[Jacqueline Myers]

Hello every one I am new here and I would like to know what a CAN bridge is? From what I have read it has a lot to do with the battery and how it distributes power to the leaf. I resecently acquired a 2012 Leaf S. Bought a new battery and yet it doesn't seem to make a difference. I mean it when I charge the car it will not charge no more than 20mile range can someone tell me why? Is something else I should be looking for?

 

[cornbinder89]

Hello every one I am new here and I would like to know what a CAN bridge is? From what I have read it has a lot to do with the battery and how it distributes power to the leaf. I resecently acquired a 2012 Leaf S. Bought a new battery and yet it doesn't seem to make a difference. I mean it when I charge the car it will not charge no more than 20mile range can someone tell me why? Is something else I should be looking for?

When you say you bought a new battery, do you mean the 12 volt under the hood or the big traction battery under the car?
CAN is controller area network, it is a system where various controllers (like the battery and chassie controllers) can "talk" to eachother over wires in the car, similar to how computers in a building can talk to eachother.
Sometimes, when parts are changed, some "translation" is required, a "can Bridge" allows this translation to take place.
So if someone installs a bigger battery pack from a later Leaf into a older Leaf, a can bridge is needed for the battery controller and the chassie/power controller to talk to eachother and understand what each is doing.
I may have over simplified a bit and am no great shakes when it comes to newer electronics, but that is jest of it. Someone can correct me if I got it wrong.
The 12 volt under the hood does not provide the power for the drive motor, so if that is what you changed, it will make no difference to the cars range.

 

[MikeinPA]

Thank you for the update! Are these VDA590 modules? I went back and looked at your first pictures, and the layout does look sound.

I was the person raising a question about using the round spacers--glad these are holding up.

I am very curious about what the vendor is doing with this CAN bridge.

 

[Ianlighting]

Very nice for the details sharing!

Regarding to the BMS reprogramming,we are still on testing.They still have their own advantages and disadvantages,for saving clients time and money points,CAN Bridge 3.0 belongs to low cost and high-effciceny way to solve the problems.

Any way!Many thanks for sharing!

Hi Paul,

Do you use the same BMS re flashing process as VIVNE? Or have you developed your own approach?

Do you supply your systems with a BMS that you source, or does the customer need to send you their BMS?

Although it sounds like you prefer to sell a CANBridge at the moment?

 

[MikeinPA]

Hi Paul,

Do you use the same BMS re flashing process as VIVNE? Or have you developed your own approach?

We have no evidence that any Leaf LBC/BMSs have had their firmware updated by third parties. None. No hints at what tools would be needed, or picture of the process, or specs for the modified LBC/BMS.

What may be happening is CAN bus components are being added to the LBC/BMS to make them work with battery capacities they were not designed for.

 

[Simon357]

I was able to drive the leaf down to 41% remaining in the pack. HV battery is showing 351.5V. Drove 92.4 miles mostly suburban roads with some highway. 3.3 average miles/kWh. With this data, I think I can safely get 140 miles of range with real world driving.

Very happy with this new Can Bridge, and the range guess-o-meter appears to be self adjusting as you drive, which is good, but it starts off at an optimistic 214 miles of range at full charge.

 

[kmcmahan]

Keep in mind I have NOTHING do do with these, and my software does NOT support these kind of bruteforce upgrades. They seem to be lacking quite on the instrumentation/BMS management side, proceed with caution. Mechanically this might (and heavy emphasis on might), but software wise they are in my opinion a long way from complete.

I agree!

 

[kmcmahan]

The car is still running great as long as we don't go under 30-40% SOC...my wife drives it daily to work. We are sitting at 30mV deviation on the pack.

There was a hiccup with the new can bridge which is why I haven't posted. They shipped it by the slowest possible method to save money, and then it got turned back by customs for reasons unknown to me. The second one they programmed for the wrong car, but caught the mistake before they shipped it. So currently, it is scheduled to arrive around late next week. Hopefully that wraps everything up.

As an enthusist, I will buy and experiment with their stuff. But as someone that wants to have a business selling and installing batteries, I can't and won't work with a company that will not shares these files to flash Can Buss bridges. Just think of the unnessary customer delays this will cause. No need to send hardware half way around the world. Send the electronic file instead. If these files were in the public domain the whole business could rapidly expand. People holding on to these file don't realize how much they are restricting this busness.

 

[kmcmahan]

We've done some of this magic in the somewhat distant past. What essentially needs to be done is a remap of the capacity curve, where the CAN bridge reads the cell voltages from the battery every 10 seconds (the internal refresh interval) and calculates capacity based on that, plus some knowledge of the IR, SOH, temperature. It's pretty tricky without good characteristics of the cells, but you get a serviceable result that doesn't cause the worst of the issues of a BMS swap.

What I am concerned about with these packs, and really anybody putting a 24kWh BMS onto NMC cells, is the super-weak balancing and inherently inaccurate balancing algorithm on that BMS. It's a really outdated BMS that can't really cope with these cells. This leads to some kinda nasty issues in the medium to long term:

- Because the BMS can't do proper coulomb counting, it will eventually wraparound and cause the pack to overcharge to approx. 420V. We've had e-mails from 3 or 4 customers over the years with this issue.
- With a lot of intensive use and/or frequent fast charging, it can't keep up with balancing and you can end up with 1 stray cell sitting 100mV+ below the rest of the pack. This is not even just an issue with modded packs, it happens in 30kWh+ packs as well
- Sometimes you seem to get random errors. I'm 50% of the opinion that this is mostly caused by balancing tabs not being mounted tightly, and 50% some weird bug in the BMS.

Our solution has been to install a CAN-bridge that:
- Just completely ******* ignores capacity, SOC, SOH and recalculates this according to the manufacturer-supplied capacity tables
- Blocks all errors from the battery pack and resynthesizes the most pressing ones
- Hard-limits charging to 404.5V - and/or - limits charge rate based on manufacturer-supplied c-rate tables

And then we instruct the customer, who realistically is a pretty decent electrical engineer to even attempt this, to regularly check cell balance and just keep an eye on things just in case.

Thanks Mux.

 

[NeguE]

I was able to drive the leaf down to 41% remaining in the pack. HV battery is showing 351.5V. Drove 92.4 miles mostly suburban roads with some highway. 3.3 average miles/kWh. With this data, I think I can safely get 140 miles of range with real world driving.

Very happy with this new Can Bridge, and the range guess-o-meter appears to be self adjusting as you drive, which is good, but it starts off at an optimistic 214 miles of range at full charge.

I don't understand why you don't still use Leaf with Turtle ON. Sometime is ON but doesn't limit something. Indeed, if limit the acceleration, I will understand.

 

[Simon357]

Just an update. My pack deviation at full charge is holding at 9mV. Range prediction at 200 miles appears to be fairly accurate as well.

We did develop an issue early on where the vehicle would not charge without cycling the Can Bridge power for a few seconds. That issue now seams to be resolved with an updated Can Bridge I just received. It also fixed the problem with leafspy constantly refreshing as far as I can tell.

 

[ZE0SV]

Just an update. My pack deviation at full charge is holding at 9mV. Range prediction at 200 miles appears to be fairly accurate as well.

We did develop an issue early on where the vehicle would not charge without cycling the Can Bridge power for a few seconds. That issue now seams to be resolved with an updated Can Bridge I just received. It also fixed the problem with leafspy constantly refreshing as far as I can tell.

So far it’s been pretty plug n play, aside from the can bridge issue. I’m very happy to hear that voltage variance isn’t skyrocketing nor causing an imbalance in the pack.
Aside from the associated risks we have discussed here, we hope the long term after say, 100 charge cycles, yields the same results. Thanks again for sharing

 

[EVPowers]

I'm much more concerned after 1,000 cycles.