Battery Upgrades are very possible

[alozzy]

Wow, I'm surprised that mux is selling those! That definitely provides some hope for DIY retrofits of newer packs in older LEAFs!!

[Oilpan4]

I'm going to start looking for a 40kwh pack late this year or next year.

[estomax]

Update, the Man-in-the-middle CAN boards from Muxsan arrived today. Purchased a 30kWh pack, gonna figure out shipping next, and I'm also always on the lookout for any 40kWh packs

Here is where the magic happens:

very cool! Do keep us all updated on your progress with this, my 24kwh pack has at least another couple of years left but this is exciting progress.

[Dala]

Today I took delivery of a 30kWh pack, time to take it apart hopefully this weekend


It was really dusty, the car must have been thoroughly crashed! 2017 with 14k miles on it!

[kebin]

As a software engineer and leaf owner, I am really interested in seeing how you are going to write a functional CAN bridge between your 24kwh car and the 30kwh battery.
In your case, reverse engineering the 24kwh protocol seems doable, since you can observe your current battery communicating with your car in all kinds of situations.
However, I wonder how difficult it will be to understand what the 30kwh battery outputs and expects as you are missing a piece of the puzzle, the car with which it communicates.
I hope CAN messages are not too different, please keep us informed of all the gory details

[alozzy]

He doesn't need to hack the CanBUS, because he already purchased a "Man-in-the-middle" CAN board from Muxsan:

https://youtu.be/hLJefVNS8JA

[kebin]

@alozzy: What I am wondering about is not the physical aspect of interfering communications between the battery and the VCM, but rather how to alter the messages (So how to program the firmware of the board mux is providing).
For this, you need to understand what each battery sends and expects to receive, unless of course they use exactly the same protocol.

[alozzy]

Presumably muxsan provides some documentation with the product, or he has open sourced the firmware and it's available on GitHub or whatever.

A Google search of GitHub reveals quite a few code projects:

"nissan leaf" canbus site:github.com

This one in particular looks promising:

https://github.com/johnmacmillan96/CAN

One would hope that, rather than having to interpret the CANBUS raw data yourself, muxsan has provided a simple to use API for manipulating specific days such as battery capacity, battery temperature, etc but that still be a work in progress.

Perhaps @muxsan will weigh in here at some point with more information.

[Dala]

I am now driving with the hybrid 24/30kWh pack, will do a shakedown before diving into the CAN-bridge properly.

Beefy cells!


On the road after 3 days downtime.


More info here: http://www.japtoys.net/forum/viewtopic. ... =15#p71210

[kebin]

Thanks for the update and nice work!

I thought you were going to put the CAN bus man in the middle adapter between the battery and the VCM in order to avoid having to open the packs and do the cell swap.

I wonder whether this approach is feasible, if it was, and if 40/62kwh batteries are electrically compatible with leaf gen1, it would mean that you could upgrade a gen1 with a gen2 battery quite easily, by just translating the protocols on the fly.