diy solar

diy solar

Valence software

Got the software working. I see similar to what somewhereinusa does... Running as a user, I see 5 tabs in the lower section, but cannot select a com port, thus the rest of the fields are blank. Running as administrator, I can select the com port, see data, and only have 3 tabs. I have a feeling this software was built for Win XP and the tighter security of things in \Program Files is creating problems. I may try to load this up on an XP machine I use for car diagnostics and see what happens.
View attachment 1049
Temp Sensors 5 and 6 are pulling numbers out of their butts. This screen shot was taken right after the SCC said the battery was full on the LiFePO4 charge profile. The Balance active button did come on during the charging cycle as well. I disconnected the computer from the battery and let it sit over night. When I hooked the computer back up, the cells were "balanced". I think it's safe to say the battery will balance on it's own.

It also appears that bank 2 is the weak one as it doesn't want to go above 3.429v during the charge cycle. The other battery I got also seems to have a weak cell. It doesn't go above 3.420v.

Up next, I'll hook up the inverter and run a load for a while to see how the battery does on the discharge side of things.
Where can I download a copy of this software?
 
Noticed something after running a battery down till inverter shutoff, 10v. The red light came on the battery, which I expected. I had the battery on charge for a couple hours, but the red light did not change to green. I disconnect the battery from the charger and let it sit for another couple hours and the red light continued to flash even though the batt voltage was now above 13. Within 5 seconds of connecting the Valence software, not doing anything else, the light switched to green... So it appears the software does have some limited ability to actually change things on the internal BMS.

Also observed that while charging this cell again, that once cell 2 hits 3.57x volts, it goes no higher. Other cells continue to increase. At some point, Balancing goes active. This happened at 76% SOC. I decided to stop charging at that point. Not much point in cooking the other cells only to have them dragged back down to the level of cell 2. After a couple minutes, I came back and SOC was now at 100%, balancing was not active. All cells within 6mV of each other. The charge current had dropped off to under 10 amps when I shut off charging, so the charger seemed to be detecting that the battery was getting full.
 
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