Transcription
[Music] And after a bit of a late-night show work last night, I'm back in the offcut garage here. Welcome back to the channel, welcome back to the offcut garage here. Oh my god, we've got autumn, and this is our autumn weather. We've got a 180 amps outside, or so. Let's have a look: 85 amps plus 60 amps, so 140. We can slowly see the shadow from the trees creeping in over the panels again. We are heading towards winter, and I'm making between 30 and 40 kW hours a day now. It has already reduced quite a lot, but that's fine because after winter there is spring, and this is what everyone who has got solar at home is looking for, right? So we are looking for spring now.
So last night I did some work on the Google power of tower, tower of power, whatever, on the Google tower, and I replaced the BMS in the top battery. Yeah, I replaced the JK inverter BMS with something else, something different, something better maybe. And our friends from Gong have sent me this parcel here with all these goodies. So this parcel is coming directly from the factory, from the G Kong factory in Shangdu in China. We are not dealing with jkbms.net anymore, or whatever they called, because this is just a trader, a reseller. We are dealing directly with a factory now. I changed all the links on my website already, so you can buy now directly here from the factory. Yeah, yeah. And our friends from G Kong were so kind to send me this parcel here with all these new devices and equipment and accessories which are not even on the market yet. Yeah, this is a bit of a glimpse into the future, so and I want to make a bit of a miniseries with these devices here. I want to show you what's coming in the near future, or maybe it's already here when you watch this video. Yeah. And I want to start with a replacement for the JK Inverter BMS.
Yeah, this is the one I took out of the top um battery in the Google tower. This is the PB2A16S20P version 14. This was the very, very first JK inverter BMS we have ever seen and tested here on the channel. Yeah, and I replaced it with um this one here. This is the JK PB2A 16S20P—uh, hang on, that is exactly the same number. What is going on here? Yeah, but this one here comes additionally with this little box here and a special accessory I want to show you right now. So I'm going to open this box and take out this EMS. Here are all the accessories underneath: balance cables, connection cables, LAN cable, communication board, and an on/off switch. So nothing special so far. And this is the new JK inverter BMS. I put the old one underneath so you can compare. Can you spot the difference? This port has changed to a screw now. This is the heating pad output negative. We've got another terminal down here for the positive power supply of the BMS. This is not hardwired anymore, as with the old ones. Wait, what? What is this heat shrink around this inductor for, huh? And the main difference, of course, is this additional UART port. Yeah, this is completely missing on the old BMS's, and this is where this other box comes into play. And you already guess it: it is a display which we can connect to this new special port. Nice, shiny glass display. Yeah, the back side is completely open. We can see a processor down here, some connection ports, a buzzer, flat ribbon cables, an antenna, interesting, and some other electronic components here. It also comes with this adhesive around the frame. And have a look how slim this display is. Yeah, this is only a millimeter thick, or so. And you make the cutout in your front panel, and then glue this display basically onto the front panel. So there's no screw mechanism or any brackets you need to hold it in place. This one is glued. At this point, I'm not sure if I actually like this, and I've asked them if they are going to change this one and it gets a proper enclosure, a plastic case where it sticks in, and they said no. And here we have the cable which goes onto this port, and the other side goes obviously into the new UART port on the BMS. All right, I would say let me quickly connect this one here to a battery, and we have a look at the display and what it can do.
So at this point, I'm not aware of any other changes for this BMS here. It has the same functionality, the same features, the same specifications, but this BMS here only contains this additional UART port now. And at this stage, I'm not sure if this will be standard for all new BMS's now, or if this is a special order which costs a bit more, but um I'll get you all this [Music] information. So, so far there's nothing special here. All the wiring is absolutely standard: connected the negative over here to the battery, connected all the balance cables to the battery terminals, checked that the voltage order is correct before I connected them, and the positive goes to the battery positive as well. Yeah, and then we connect the power button down here and the display to the new UART port. All right, let's turn on the BMS, and here comes the display. Ooh, that looks nice and shiny. Okay, I'll try to get a clearer picture here. Let me turn off the bench light. Yeah, that's a bit better. So at the moment it doesn't show any data at all because this is a brand new BMS, so we need to log in via the Bluetooth app first and set it all up. Okay, we go into all the settings. So let me turn on the screen recorder here so you can actually better see. Start recording. Okay, so I'm in the app already, uh here from the dashboard. Nothing has changed; everything is still there. And we have to go into the settings, advanced settings, and go all the way down to the communication protocols, and you will find that you now have a UART 3 protocol number. See, this sits on 10, so you need to click on this one and need to go all the way down to number 15, jkbms PBX series LCD protocol only. This protocol drives the LCD screen, so we select number 15, click on okay, and we have communication now. We can see what's going on. Yeah, so we can see the overall voltage of the battery here, the current going in or out of the battery, the battery capacity which I haven't changed yet; it is 40 amp hours by default, and the remaining capacity, state of charge with a circle there, maximum cell, minimum cell, maximum temperature, the power going in or out of the battery, if there is an alarm, how many packs we have in parallel, and if the charge MOSFETs are on or off. And we also can change the language up here. It is a nice touch display; very gentle touch only; it is super responsive. So we can then go into packs. We have only one battery connected at the moment. If you have more than one battery, they will all show up here, and of course you can click on each of the packs, and it gives you more details about each of your battery pack you have in parallel. Yeah, we go back here. I think this is just an animation for whatever reason; I don't know. We go into settings, and we can see here we can set the RS485 protocol or CAN protocol for the BMS, so this is the inverter communication you can set here through the display. So we can go into CAN communication and can say we've got Victron, and it says Victron there now. Yeah, if you have an inverter with RS485 communication, you can change this here as well. There's a whole bunch of supported inverters already.
So that's pretty much everything this display does and shows you. And now you probably understand why I have done the late-night shift last night to install a different BMS in this top battery box. So I took out the previous JK inverter BMS and put one of the new JK inverter BMS's in with the UART port and the new display. And this is our master BMS here, so it takes care of all these um slave batteries here. And let's have a look at the display how these other batteries actually show up now. Uh, we are currently charging with 48 amps into all of the four batteries. We've got a pack voltage here of 53.23 volts. Obviously the voltage is fairly equal because they're all in parallel. We've got an overall battery capacity of 1178 amp hours and close to 640 are available. The maximum cell voltage of all four batteries connected is 3.33 volts, minimum cell voltage, the maximum temperature measured in all four batteries 27°. We are charging with 2.5 kW at the moment. There's no alarm; we've got four packs in parallel, and charging/discharging obviously is enabled. Yeah, under settings here we still got the same settings, so you can set the RS485 and CAN protocol as I have just shown you on the other BMS. So if you go into PEX, we can now see four PEX here from 0 to 3, and this is exactly how the DIP switches are set on the JK inverter BMS. So obviously the master is number zero. You can have a look in here; we can see the animation here: 66% state of charge, we've got a 280 amp hour battery, and 184 are available. Yeah, we are charging this one battery with 11 amps. If you go back again, yeah, we are overall charging with 48, close to 50 amps, but only 11 amps are going into the master. Yeah, you can see all the different uh cell voltages of the master. Charging/discharging is obviously on; there's no alarm, and maximum temperature is 27. It shows you zero again here, and you can go back, go into pack number one. This is a 314 amp hour battery; uh, we are charging with 15 amps. Not sure why there's no animation here actually. So voltage difference here of this battery number one is 4 mV. We're charging at 14.8 amps, 26°, all the cell voltages, and the same for battery number three. It's a 280 amp hour battery again; it's flashing again here, not sure. There was just 0 mV difference between all the cells, but now we've got 2 mV, 10 amps going into the battery, 26°, all the voltages, and pack number four: 67%, 304 amp hours, 4 mV, 10.7 amps, 26°, all the voltages.
So that's actually pretty cool that you can dive into each of your batteries of such a tower now on one display. Yeah, you don't need to take out your app anymore and connect to every single battery individually, read the information, connect to the next battery, read the information, and do the same for battery number two and three as well. Then you have already forgotten what's going on in battery number one. And this is a very quick way to keep control of all individual cell voltages of the um voltage delta, temperatures, and the charging status and alarm functions overall. And I can actually make this cutout here a bit wider, and then we can have this display sitting here in the Google box like this. Looks pretty cool. So at the moment the display is staying on all the time, even there is no current going in or out of the battery. So let's have a look here in the settings. So it says here, display always on, this is enabled. If I turn this off, let's see if the display actually turns off here, but from what I have seen from the other pack last night, it didn't, but there's clearly nothing connected to the BMS, so there's 100% no current going in or out of this battery, and it looks like it just stays on all the time now. So I think this is a bit of a bug; it should actually listen to the uh setting here in the app. Okay, no big deal; they will fix this in one of the next um app versions or firmware version.
So while we are in the BMS here, I also want to show you the version of this BMS here. So this is hardware version 19A, software version 19.00. So obviously this is a complete new hardware and software now we are seeing here in the JKBMS, and there's no version 15 38 or something. This is software version 19, so there is now a third hardware version out there. We've got version 14, version 15, and now here version 19. Also, if you want the new app version 5.0.1, I'll link it down below. So if this is version 19, did I do some time traveling and missed 16, 17, and 18? Where are these versions? And I've seen there's another one, two, three, six-pin connector here on the back as well. First I thought this is for the power button because, well, this one actually fits into this plug here, but it doesn't react to it. So it says uh K positive, K negative, ground, not connected, not connected, and then there's a VIN, VIN pin. So I'm not sure what this one is for: expansion port for something. But we also can see that here's an antenna, so there might be something coming in the future with this display. And I heard about rumors about the Wi-Fi connection for the display. Sorry, no, I didn't say anything. No.
All right, guys, so I had a quick chat with our friends at um G Kong about this symbol here. Sometimes it's flashing, and sometimes it's static. See, it's flashing there, and usually it should flash um when there is current going into the battery. Yeah, it's a charging animation, and this is a software bug they already know about, so it will be fixed in one of the next versions. And I'm also um not sure if I actually like these settings here because this is clearly something you set only once at the beginning and then never ever touch again, right? So why waste this space here on the display with a settings tab for a setting which you never touch again? Maybe we can use this space here for something more useful, um I don't know, maybe charge MOSFETs on/off, or so, or we can set the charge current limit which gets reported to the inverter. Leave your comments down below what kind of settings would you like to see here on the display. So it needs to be something which is useful, which um is being used maybe not frequently, but more often than the actual inverter protocol, cuz this is a once-off, and then we never use this again. It's a bit of wasted feature space here, I would say. But yeah, let me know what you want to see there, and maybe we can get something done. Yeah, apart from that, I'm pretty stoked with this new display here. It gives you a lot of information, especially when you have parallel packs, and you can dive into each of the individual battery packs here and can see all the single cell voltages, the voltage difference of each pack. So this is actually a pretty good extension to the existing JK inverter BMS, but it's actually good to see we have a version 19 JK inverter BMS with a version 14 uh JK inverter BMS with two version 15 JK inverter BMS's, and they are all talking to each other. That is so nice to see that there's no cut, and these BMS's are all still compatible and are talking to each other. Nice work, JK. This is what I always hated with Sephlos, for example. There was a version one, version two, and version three. Version one and two, they kind of talked to each other; that worked kind of, but version three was completely isolated from these two first versions; they were not compatible. And if you had already batteries with a version one or two BMS's and you bought another one with a version three, they were not compatible, so you had to upgrade all your batteries with the same BMS. Then here JK, they show everyone how it's been done. And I've got also confirmation that the UART 3 port on the uh JK Inverter BMS will be standard default um from now on, basically. It may take until next month, April, or even May, until we see these ones here available in the online stores because what we are seeing here is still a bit of a test environment, and um this port is also necessary for the um future feature which I haven't mentioned here in this video.
All right, my friends, there you have it. This was a quick video just to show you the new JK inverter BMS. Well, it's it's not a new one; it's more an upgraded one with a new feature, but the screen, the screen is definitely new and has a ton of information now it can display. And I know some people don't care about displays at all because the battery is hidden somewhere and you would never look on the display anyway, and for others it is an essential part of their system and they use it all the time. Yeah, probably I am somewhere in between, but I can see the huge benefit of this new display here when you have parallel batteries, and quite frankly you need only one display for the master BMS, and this gives you the information of all the slaves battery as well. So that is actually pretty good. That is an easy one. 582. Thank you very much for 106,582 subscribers. Welcome to all the new viewers and also to the existing ones. As always, guys, thank you so much for watching. Thanks for all your amazing support here; you are really amazing. Thank you very much, and until the next video, guys, when we have uh another look in the box here. There are some heaps of stuff in there which I want to show you which I haven't seen myself yet, and I'll keep the most amazing thing until the very last of this miniseries here. It is probably something we always wanted and never thought it is actually possible, and it probably will blow your mind maybe even twice. Well, I keep this until the end of this miniseries here. All right, my friends, until the next video. You stay charged, stay safe, and thanks again for watching. See you then. Bye-bye. Pretty cool. [Music] That is new as well.