Interconnected the battery blocks and started the charger to be greeted by two sparks and smoke. (Not from the battery blocks)
1st spark was caused by the current inrush into the charger filter capacitors from the battery pack, must watch that and power up psu/charger to charge internal caps before making the connection or leave it permanently connected or have some sort of pre-charge resistor.
2nd one with smoke
came from back of charger/psu and heart sank
but PSU still worked, opened it up to discover a tiny piece of copper swarf had fallen through a vent hole onto the output terminals. It had obviously vapourised but left a tiny piece to help identify the culprit.
Then about two hrs into the 200ma balancing charge, cells starting to come up to full V and balancing leds switching on and off. I test charger in line cheapo cut out relay by simulating a fault and charger trips out correctly but won't restart
, hmm relay is operating but no power getting to charger so looks like the under specced mains e-bay relay has failed. I have a much better one standing by, but ran out of time until Friday.
I did finish off the pack data/bcm connections and started tidying up some of the other wiring on the old Insight battery pack box, which has been emptied of nimh cells and now holds the odd bits of extra electronics reqd and the Master board for the new pack.
My eta is end of october for instalation.
EDIT Oh, I bought one of those microscopic 433mhz data transceiver kits with an alleged 50-100m range. I like the idea of a remote wireless monitor for the BMS in the house. Probably a simple 16x2 lcd in a little box driven by a picaxe 08M chip just relaying the info from the Master onboard the car. It can easily have a remote alarm function as well, so it's basically a little pager type thingy. On screen pack voltage etc etc. Another winter project and a simple serial link to the house PC so I can start accumulating charge data for analysis.