Transcription
Good morning, my friends, and welcome back to the Offit Garage. I hope you had a wonderful good night's sleep. We are back in the garage, and we had a bit of a, uh, we've got 21 amps outside, and we had a bit of an low voltage situation. We are just above 50 volts now, but the weather looks good, so I'm very confident we will recharge the battery, and we will get over 30, 40% today. I maybe that's a bit too ambitious; I don't know. All right, so in yesterday's video, we had a first look at the new old style JKBMS's. Here, I have connected the alarm light with buzzer and also the voice module on this um small two-pin connector. Yeah, this is the dry one contact; you can program via the JK app. And as I said yesterday, you can also connect a 12vt contacttor or a little relay, and then you have your real potential free dry contacts, normally closed, normally open, things like this. Yeah, you can do your own thing, but it is now possible with these devices to have a dry contact to turn on a light, to turn on a generator, to turn on a charger, to turn off your solar, whatever you like. So, same functionality as in the inverter BMS's, just with one contacttor only.
So, um, I guess there are more devices in this box. Let's uh have a look. And the next module is called Pink CR, and we have seen these um letters here on the BMS already. Yeah, C stands for CAN; r stands for RS485. So obviously, it has something to do with communication and a link. Let's have a look. And I've got two of these modules in here. Let me blow your mind; look at this. It is a communication board for the B series of the JKBMS. How crazy is that? And up here it says RS485-P for parallel, and here it says CAN, and here is RS485 external. That means we have a communication here between the BMS's, like in the inverter style BMS as well, with internal RS485 ports to parallel multiple of these BMS's. We have an external CAN communication to your inverter, and we also have an external RS485 communication also to your inverter if it speaks RS485 only. And this is exactly what we have seen in the app already, that we can change the UART protocols for the BE series of the JKBMS, and we can also set a CAM protocol for this BMS now as well. And this communication board is nothing different to the to the communication board we have for the inverter style BMS. To this one, we've got internal RS485 ports and external CAN and RS485. Yeah, we have also an RS232, but we've never used this one. Right. So you can now upgrade your B series BMS with communication capability. There are these two tiny cables; one plugs in on this end and the other one plugs in on this end. And here on the BMS, you need to plug in one to the GPS port; this is also RS485 protocol, and one to the CAN port here on the BMS, and you can't mix them up basically. So it's fairly straightforward to connect them, this one here and this one here. And when you connect them, you also get a green light here on the communication board; it has only one light; there's no battery gauge or something. So, and now the communication ports are active and can be programmed via the app.
So let's connect to the BMS via the app. Uh, one, two, three, four, five, six. Go into the advanced settings, a little bit further down here. Here we can see the UART1 protocol and the UART 2 protocol and also the CAN protocol. Yeah, so UART one is the external protocol to talk to your inverter; this is the RS485 external, this one here, and you can change this one here to crowbot or voltronic or pylon or whatever inverter you have to send all the information from the BMS to your inverter and control it as we know from the JK inverter BMS. The URL protocol 2 needs to be on 01 JK RS485 modus. Yeah, this is the internal protocol which enables these BMS to communicate with each other. Usually, this one is grayed out; I'm not sure why this one is actually accessible here. Could be a bug in the app here or in the firmware of the BMS. And then we have finally the CAM protocol here as well, which we also can set to Victron, for example. Change this all to okay, and now we have established our communication. So we click this one into our CAN port, and the other end goes into the battery room directly to the Zerbo GX via a type one cable from uh Victron. So we are now having a look at the Serbo GX, and we can see the JK inverter BMS is still connected here, which is just a name, you know, you can put any name in there; it can be cheesecake or whatever you like; it doesn't matter. But this is now connected to this BMS here on the workbench, the B series JK BMS. You can see the voltage here, 12.76 volts. Yeah, so let's go into this uh BMS and have a look at parameters. We can see we've got the charge voltage limit of 27.6 volts. Yeah, ah, because I still have got the cell count wrong here; it is only four. All right, there we go. Now the CVL has changed on the screen, and we can set the CVL here, uh voltage cell RCV, the requested charge voltage, 3.45 * 4 is 13.88. If I change this one here to 3.5, for example, click on okay, click on okay, you will see the uh requested charge voltage here from the inverter from your charger to the battery will actually change. And uh charge current, let's have a look at charge current; it sits on 40 amps, and the JKBMS always takes 5% off for safety reasons. So if we set this one here, for example, to 100, we will see 95 amps of requested charge current from your inverter or charger MPPPTs, whatever you have connected. Yeah, discharge current is 300 amps in the app and 285 here in the system. If you change this to 100 as well, okay, you will see the same 95 amps here in your inverter settings as well. So you've got now full control with the B series BMS from JK; we are CAN communication to your inverter; I mean, I mean, come on. Right. So with such a small BMS here, look, this is just the size of my palm; with such a small BMS and connect it to your inverter, for example, in an RV or in a small boat, you can have a 16S battery, and this one fully controls your Victron inverter, for example, but you can change the CAM protocol to any other inverter as well. I mean, look how big this one is and how small this one is. Yeah, both of them can communicate via CAM protocol to your inverter. So, and while we have the communication running between the BMS and the Serbo GX or your inverter, we want to we want to do it; we want to parallel another BMS to the B series BMS and see if it actually reports the correct data to your inverter if it knows there are two BMS's, because at the moment, um, let's go back in here quickly and go to details; it will only show you one battery is online, obviously with 40 amp hours, which is not correctly set up now, but it doesn't matter; can see the highest and lowest voltage and highest and lowest temperature here; this is all um battery number zero; this is the master yeah, communicating with your inverter; one module online. So let's connect another BMS to the B series BMS. Wait, what did I just say?
So I've got the good old Jeggy 100 amp hour battery here where we have replaced the uh pace BMS inside with a JK inverter BMS. Yeah, this is the JK inverter BMS, so that's why the display doesn't work anymore. The BMS is also turned on, and we plug in the LAN cable to the internal RS485 port, and we take the other cable and Oh, oh, oh, come on, and we plug in the other side of the cable to the RS485P for parallel. So let's plug it in; does it show anything on the screen? There's still only one battery online, so it doesn't work. So you cannot parallel the JK inverter BMS with the B series BMS, as you can see; it's not working. But guys, I'm just kidding; of course it works. As always, when you parallel these batteries, you have to set your DIP switches correctly. So let's have a look here in the um app for this B series BMS; you can see the device address sits on one here, right, and we want to put this one here on zero because this is our master; the B series BMS, this one here on the workbench, is our master, and we want this one here as our slave. So we have to put dip switch number one to on. Yeah, first slave, nothing different to what you would do with the inverter BMS's as well. And as soon as we did this, you've seen this on the screen; we've got two BMS's online. So the B series BMS now is the master; it gets the information from the inverter BMS in the Jagy battery and reports this combined to the Victron system. Look at this; we've got two batteries online. If you wonder why there is an eight here and not a one for battery number one, when we did the swap from the PaceBMS to the JKBMS, I have not swapped the communication board, so this is the original pace BMS communication board, and for some reason these dip switches are mirrored, so number one is not number one but number eight. So what we need to do to get number one, we need to set dip switch number four to one. Yeah, this is usually 1, 2, 4, 8, so this would be number eight, but in this case it is number one; it is all upside down, so to speak. Now this doesn't help; it is just the other way around. You will see this here on the screen; now it's now reporting battery number one instead of battery number eight. It's not too important; it's just a small incompatibility between the pace BMS communication board and the JK inverter BMS, but everything else works. So you can now see the lowest cell is in battery number zero, which is our test battery here on the on the bench where the master B series BMS is connected to, and the highest voltage is in the Jackie battery controlled by the JK inverter BMS. We've got two batteries online, and combined we have 100 amp hours from the Jackie battery plus another 40 amp hours from this test battery here combined reported to the inverter. Yeah, and if you have multiple of these B series BMS's and these P link ZR modules, you can obviously parallel only these ones; they don't have to be parallelled with the inverter BMS; you can only parallel these ones; you can only parallel these ones, or you can do a combination of both. Yeah, obviously in this case it doesn't make sense because we've got only a 12-volt battery here and a 48vt battery here, so you cannot really connect this, but this is more to demonstrate the communication between these two very different BMS's which are not so different anymore. Right. So when you parallel multiple of these B series BMS's together, you can set the address we are the app. Yeah, you just so you just go into your device address and set whatever slave you have; slave number five if you have six of these uh BMS's in parallel. And because you can also put ridiculous numbers in here like 99 and it accepts it, I was asking Gong, can you actually parallel 99 of these BMS's together, and they said yes, you can, though there's no 16 battery limit anymore, but unfortunately it can only read the first 16 batteries because of internal memory restrictions of this BMS; it can only handle up to 16 batteries. But from what I heard, I think they are working on a different solution for that, so you can parallel more than 16 BMS's. This is especially good for people with a lot of batteries. Okay, what else can we do with this communication module connected to the B series? I need to repeat it all the time because I can't believe it myself, to the B series BMS. So let us disconnect the cable here from the servo and connect this one and connect this one to the RS485 adapter to my computer and obviously change the LAN cable from the CAN communication port to the internal RS485 port again. This is nothing new; this is what we are doing with the inverter BMS as well. We plug into one of these RS485 ports and then to your computer via an RS485 to USB adapter. So we then need to go into the app again and change the change the device address from 99 to say number one. So communication to the servo has now stopped because I've unplugged the cable, and now we can open the JKBMS monitor software as we have done with the inverter BMS. We set the device address to one, what we have set in the app; com 5 is my internal communication port; click on connect, and we have full communication from the computer software to the B series of the BMS now. So if you look under about, we can see we've got the hardware version 17A here with a software version 1706; this is the 8 SBMS with 300 amps charging discharging and the 2 amp active balancer connected; got the serial number and all the other data as well. So the next thing which comes to your mind is now, oh, it would be great if we can do firmware upgrades to these BMS's as well now, and we know this is not possible; you know, we cannot upgrade the B series of the JK BMS's ever with new firmware, until now. With this communication module, we can actually upgrade the firmware on these B series BMS's. We can upgrade the firmware on the B series. Okay, let's do it. It's the um same procedure as with the inverter BMS's; click on these three dots, upload fire, and I've also created a new subfolder under the firmware folder on my one drive; it is called the B series. At the moment, there are only three types of firmware for BMS's in there. I mean, obviously we have to select the B2A 8S30P; this is exactly the one we have connected, and this will upgrade the software version to 1904. I've never tried this myself; open; major version is not the same to connect device; ooh, that's interesting; should I do a force update? So it should actually recognize that. So we go to Mirror's website, and the only thing we need to do is um copy this code here, 1504201; it is valid for another 25 minutes and 25 seconds; it changes every hour; click on this; has been copied; we go back into the JKBMS monitor software; upload firmware; it may break the BMS; now I'm not sure if this is the right firmware they sent me because it says this is not the same device, but we try a force update; put in the code; click on okay; it is beeping; it is not doing anything; so obviously this is not the right firmware they have sent me, even it is for the correct BMS, but this seems to be version 19 while we have version 17 here. All right, uh, let me quickly connect another BMS, and we try again with a different firmware. No, actually, I think I know what it is because I had the same issue before. Okay, let's disconnect from this software here; I think this um new monitor software has a bug because I've tried exactly the same with this new monitor 302 with the inverter style BMS to flash the version 19.04 onto the inverter BMS, and it didn't work. So what I did, I changed to the older version of the monitor software, which is the 270, and this worked just fine. So let's try this one; we connect here to the BMS; ah, I want to show you something before we actually flash this BMS; under settings, you can see up here lithium ion, lithium ion phosphate, LTO, verify password; yeah, there only these four buttons to choose from. Um, after we flash the firmware successfully, uh, see this is the version 19 PB series; this is the inverter style BMS which I've already flashed with this software, but now we've got the B series, the B2A8S30P; it again says it is not compatible; we try again; force update; and it flashes. So we are flashing now a B series BMS; I hope it works because I've never seen this message before; major version is not the same to connect the device successfully; we get a beep, a fairly long beep; ah, super long beep; uh, it is not stopping beeping; I'll try to turn it off; oh my god; it is not turning off; okay, I'm pulling the balance cables; we probably have pricricked the BMS now; I'm not sure; okay, let's try again; plug them in; and let me turn it on via the screen button; now this is gone; see this happens when you flash with force update onto a BMS; gone; I'm sure Gong can give me some instructions how to fix that. Okay, uh, let me quickly connect another of their BMS's here which has the correct file actually for this BMS.
All right, I've now swapped the um 300 amp BMS for this um 80 amp BMS here, and I've only connected the main positive of these balance cables to my power supply which sits on 25 volts, and I've also connected the negative, the black cable, to the B negative of the BMS and connected this also to the power supply. So all of the other balance cables are not connected at all; you don't need it if you just want to fire up the JKBMS; main positive, main negative cable, the B negative of the BMS, and that's it. I've also connected the button here so we can turn it on. Now there we go, and the communication board is also connected to the cam port and um GPS port as before; the green light is on, and we are still connected to the computer software. So the only thing I need to do is So let's go into the JK; do a search; um, this must be the top one here; serial number 510; I don't know; yes; the beep comes from here; perfect. So let's have a look what we have here; about; we've got the BD6A, so it's a 6 amp balancer, 24S, 80 amps maximum current, and you can see this one is actually the version 19H, so this is a different hardware version to the 300 amp BMS we had before, and I think the flashing will work here because see because all these files they have sent me they all have version 1904 in it, and this previous BMS was a version 17, so I kind of expected it wouldn't work, but let's see if it works with this one. So we also go down here and check on the address; it's on one already; perfect; so device address one, com five; let's connect to the BMS; there it is already; nice; cool; we go under about; can see the BMS um model number, serial number, hardware version 19H, and the software or firmware version is 19.0. So I think we will now have success with flashing this B series BMS with a new firmware because this is already on version 19, and we only upgrade to version 1904. Yeah, it says here BD6; this is the model I have; 1904; okay; yes; and we don't see this yellow warning text in here anymore that this is not compatible, and we don't actually need to do a false update; we can just do this; start updating; okay; let's update; our first successful B series BMS; yes, it works; look at this; huh; we're upgrading a B series BMS; double beep; successful; and that's it; we do a quick refresh; go to about; we've got 1904; right. So if you go into settings now, you can see that nothing has changed, right, in here; nothing has really changed, but we are still in the old version of the computer software. So if we go out of here and we go back in the monitor 302 and connect with this one to the BMS and go under, let it connect first; yep; here we are; let's check again; 1904; perfect; and we go under settings; you have now a lot of more buttons up here; we finally have an export and import function as well as a send batch button. Yeah, that means, okay, when we one, two, three, four, five, six, when we activate this, we can actually export all the settings of this BMS here. Let's do it, and it creates a file under download, and we call uh this one here um version 19H. Yeah, this is the hardware version, and it puts the JK CFG extension on this file; we click on save, and boom; we have a look in the download folder, and we can see the version 19H, and it also adds JK BD6A24S8P 1904. Yeah, it adds this automatically to whatever I put in as the name for the file, and this is very important because you can only restore these information on the same model BMS and on the same firmware; you cannot restore this file on any other BMS than the exactly the same model with the same firmware. Yeah, keep this in mind because different firmware have different functions, and you probably have information in this file which are not compatible with a different firmware, even it is the same BMS model. And I'm going to import now all the settings for this BMS again which we have just saved. So we click on open; import data successful; before you actually continue, you have to click on the send batch; this will ensure that all the parameters you've seen on the screen here as are being sent back to the BMS; if I would leave it as is, disconnect from the BMS, it would not save these new settings here. Yeah, so send batch; sending all these parameters back to the BMS; successful; bang; there we go; import and export only for the same model and same firmware; if this is not the case, the file will not work; it is useless for you then. And also keep in mind this function only works with the new version of the monitor software 302 and the new firmware version 1904. I've asked Jong already to make this compatible with the version 14 and 15 of the BMS's, and they said okay, so it will come at a future firmware update, hopefully very soon, and then you can export and import with your older firmware uh JK inverter BMS's as well. There's no difference anymore from the inverter BMS to the B series BMS now, as you can see, and this is super super exciting, I think. Right, is that correct?
Well, guys, there you have it, the new B series JKBMS with communication board. You can connect it to the computer software; you can parallel it to other JK BMS's like the inverter BMS or like other B series BMS's with the communication board. I also have tried to let this one communicate with um version 14 and version 15 of the inverter BMS, and it all works a treat. So I basically connected the B series BMS to my Google power tower of power stack here; these are version 19, version 14, version 15, version 15 BMS, and I connected the B series as slave number four to this stack here, and it was all communicating beautifully together. So I really appreciate that J Kong is making all these BMS's compatible to each other, that they are backwards compatible and talking to older versions of their inverter BMS, and it really makes these products so great, I think, because as you may remember, the version three of the Sephus BMS, for example, does not talk to the version two of the Selos BMS or the version one of the Selos BMS. Yeah, this is a completely standalone environment now, and if you have already seos batteries with version one or two, they will not talk to version three anymore, and that is not great. And as you have seen and tested many times here on the channel, you can also parallel batteries with different capacities. Yeah, 280, 314, 304, or even a 100 amp hour battery or 48vt system, 16S batteries can be parallel to each other, and the BMS's take care of all the data and send this all combined to your inverter, to the Victron system, to whatever you have. So this is all working beautifully, and now even with the B series of their BMS. And of course, another mind-blowing thing is that we can do firmware upgrades on these B series BMS's, something we have never thought would be possible. We always said B series cannot be upgraded, and this was actually true until version 14. Yeah, from version 15 onwards or 15 and newer, these BMS's are actually capable of getting a new firmware; you can flash them at home either with the communication board or through another method I will show you in a future video, but then here on the other hand, where do you get the new firmware from? Only Gong in China is producing this new firmware, and I'm not sure if people start bombarding them now with wishes and requests for new firmware.
With bug fixes and new features, if they will actually respond to these inquiries, I don't think so, but from a technical perspective, it is definitely possible. Yeah, and we also had the unfortunate situation that Gong has sent me a wrong firmware file for this version 17 of the 300 amp uh BMS. And I did a force update, even knowing, or kind of knowing, it was the wrong firmware for this BMS. And as we have seen, it has pricricked it; it is now a beeping BMS as soon as I turn it on.
So if you get this warning message during flashing of your firmware to a BMS, uh, it's probably not a good idea to continue, because it may not work; it will break your BMS and make it unusable. So Chong has promised to send a new firmware version, a version 1404, a version 1704 for this specific BMS, and then we do a recovery flashing of the firmware, even if it seems to be pricricked now, but we know how to fix this already. I made a couple of videos about this; I link them all down below, how to flash and how to recover these um BMS's if they are pricricked. So we will do this in a future video as well. I'll show you quickly again how this works with the B series BMS, and then we should be able to recover it and use it again as normal with the correct firmware file.
So unfortunately, at the moment, I don't think this one is actually online available. I'm pushing Chong really hard to make this available on their online store. The alarm light and the buzzer I showed in the previous video is already online, yeah, but this one here should be online very, very soon. So if you have a B series BMS version 15 or newer, you can actually get these uh parallel communication boards here, with a cabling, connect this to your BMS if it has the CR functionality for CAN and RS485, and then you can parallel these B series BMS's with other B series BMS's with this communication board, or an inverter BMS, or you can do the import and export function with all the settings for this BMS.
And if you discover a bug, get in contact with Chong; they may be able to send you a new firmware file, and then you can just use the newest battery monitor software for the JK BMS and flash it yourself. I mean, how good is that, right? How good is that? Then we can do updates on these BMS now. In the next video, I want to show you the other feature of the B series BAS to make it actually feature complete and the same as the inverter BMS. Yeah, one particular module is still missing here, so there's still a difference between inverter and B series BMS, but with the next feature I want to show you, um, it will be exactly the same, so 100%; there's no difference anymore.
Until then, guys, thank you so much for 108,23 subscribers here on the channel. Welcome to all the new viewers. Thank you very much for all the generous donors here, buying me a beer, a coffee, a smoothie, whatever you want to call it; there are heaps of possibilities. You can support the channel, becoming a channel member, for example; then you get access to some exclusive channel member-only content. These wonderful people are supporting me on a regular and monthly base for less than the price of a coffee, so thank you so much for that. This all makes these videos here possible. All right, my friends, until the next video, I would say you stay charged, stay safe, and thanks again for watching. See you then, bye-bye.