The one thing that is a big plus is this technology is the temp sensor. Not for regular use or tracking but purely pure safety during charging. Heat is the first sign of a battery going bad on a charger and not having to add external temp sensors to achieve temp protection is a big plus. Other than that I agree with you comments Joshua. With more additions this can be a cool and useful new tech.
FinalGlideAus but what about if you live somewhere hot as balls like you right now. I’m from Chicago. Will the charger improperly treat a battery? I know very little about this. Not trying to be a smart ass, just asking an honest question. Love the new frame btw.
A good charger measures both but voltage is the important factor when charging as going over or under certain voltages is what can damage the cell and cause safety issues.
Betaflight should support it. So you will use battgo xt60 on you quad, connect those two small wires to FC and you will see cell voltage and cycles... :D
That's actually pretty clever. It would be amazing to get individual cell voltages without having a separate sensor, and to get battery temperature in flight.
Joshua Bardwell Joshua Bardwell yeah, now we just need to buy whole battgo technology from ISDT. Because their battgo lipo checkers will be pretty much useless. Or we need someone smart that will copy code, But that will be illegal :/
yes and a gyro and some ESCs and a big mult-ipole connector... but if you also include the motors and the receivers and... and... then you don;t need any connector at all. :)
"BattGo isn't going anywhere" - Joshua Bardwell. Jokes aside, loving all your videos man. Very informative, straight to the point and as unbiased as it gets! Spent my whole evening consuming your content about parallel charging, chargers and so on 😆
I know that most of the guys with big drone channels are all smart guys. You aren't necessarily smarter than them, but always seem to think outside the box. I really like that about your channel. You test different things and ask different questions than the other guys. Sure you promote your stuff, but I don't understand why everyone acts like thats a bad thing. Subscribed.
We can make something very similar, or even better using a simple micro controller, like a PIC16F1827 QFN and a simple small board with voltage dividers, and adding a one wire interface so we can communicate with a set of batteries with its own ID or address, parallel charging them and communicating with them at the same time. And of course, OPEN SOURCE. I mean, is not that hard to do, the concept is pretty simple. Nice video Joshua :)
My favorite videos are these informative ones. Videos about the newest and possibly "greatest?" New tech. Reason being that we as a community are so eager to jump at the next big thing, that we sometimes find our selves a dollar short with or.... In our hands. But not today. Thanks bro.
I have TH-cam Red...I forgot that TH-cam has ads..Lol it would be nice if isdt sold a one time license to battery manufacturers. Isdt chargers are some of the most popular chargers everyone seems to have. This tech is awesome and I think the success or failure is going to be determined by whether other battery manufacturers implement the tech. I agree, needs to be calibrated from the factory or user ability to calibrate. As far as parallel boards, it could be awesome. They could create a board that reads each batteries voltage and makes parallel charging even safer. They could make the charger send charge to different packs that are lower voltage until all the packs are the same voltage and then charge them all.
@Joshua Bardwell I stand over a 5 gal bucket of water while I am disassembling batteries. One time, I shorted it, sparks flew, I flinched and dropped the battery in the bucket. Perfect :) Then i just add some salt and let it marinade.
Revolectrix "Bump" tags can be written, but only once. It doesn't do anything other than identify the battery (for logging) and set the charger as you asked it to before writing the tag. So the default charging information is written in the tag itself. There is no special circuitry in the battery, so no temperature exceptions, balancing or anything like that.
Don't take me wrong, I hate the idea if a iSDT proprietary protocol as much as you do, but if they do it with individual addressing capabilities then we don't need any balance cable and that would be good. And as someone suggested below somewhere, an extra FET on each connector of the smart parallel board would solve the problems with differences in voltages between the batteries when you start charging. All good...
Oh spiffy background lighting! Looks really nice man. I really really like the self-discharge option of BattGo. My first thought when this video started was how it could handle parallel charging. It would be nice if it worked like Blheli32 ESC Telemetry, but the charger would have to be capable of talking to and reading from multiple batteries.
yep, not even the original ISDT board has XT60-I plugs. I guess the battery will be charged like all other batteries by controlling individual cell voltage by the balance plug and the chip will record whether it is overcharged or over-discharged or any other event the internal sensors can record. The next time you plug it in a compatible device you will see all cycles and events that happened. Frankly the auto-discharge alone is worth the 2 extra dollars per battery.
I should have enough to last for a few months now. This month I purchased five. Last month, 15. I was trying to hold out for the future battery tests Joshua plans on doing, but had a bit of battery bad luck. I'm the worst at battery management, and should really put a timer on the Taranis for the quads that don't have an OSD. The batteries might last a little longer. ;-)
Check the automatic discharge please. How does it work? I haven't seen any big resistor that could turn the over-voltage into heat - or is there something on the board under the board? Also... self-heating batteries seem like another catastrophe waiting to happen
I guess there are some tiny little resistors on the chip that can consume some miliAmps. I heard that autostorage takes days to reach the storage voltage. Who cares how fast it is done, as long as it is automatically done and saves you time and money?
@@marchofer8829 time matters... you can't use it for charging while it's discharging. You mal also have a lot to discharge... You don't wanna wait days per batch
Hi, do the xt60h(xt60+) exist in red and blue and black also wher can i buy this sleeves for the xt60h(xt60+) separately and the male or female xt60 separately?
But since the batteries do the monitoring and storage of the information, then you can parallel charge them on a different board and still get most of the benefit by having just a record of how many times they were overdischarged or overheated.
How hot does it get when it discharges the battery to get into storage that's one of my concerns you have a battery sitting there on your desk getting hot due to the fact it's just charging itself
Ok this might be flawed thinking but why not just use a traditional multicharge balance board it has the same effect of balancing the batteries, adding the middle input into a new board seems like a hat on a hat so to speak, Unless somehow the center pin is far more accurate than the balance port? .... And the tech is still cool, if I could get it from a different manufacturer I would like to try it, at least for monitoring the health of the battery which is important to me. That's why I keep track of the internal resistance and just placed an order for the isdt Checker you have. The real question is can these batteries even compete with R lines or w.e.? And is the extra weight worth it is balancing Beyond .000 necessary? This might be very cool on the new style of batteries with removable balance port cables, if you could balance charge with only one xt60 that would be complete Game Changer in my opinion if the battery manufacturer was good.. And affordable or worth the price....
BMS on the RC LiPos... not a bad idea but I fear the auto-storage function. Auto-storage means self-discharging. Self discharging means dissipating some heat in that well insulated BMS. So, if the Q/C is not 100%, in theory at least, there are plenty ways for that BMS to shot a cell by accident. Happens on well established phone batteries. Their BMS shorts out and the cell just...resigns.
There's another company that does something similar "SPEKTRUM S2100 Smart Charger & Batteries"....anyone using these 'Smart Batteries' and tech with their FPV Drones...can't find much out there on the internet specific to FPV and wondering if people are actually using this tech? I need a charger (new to FPV) and wondering if these are worth a closer look to simplify LIPO charging..
Hi Joshua, i apologize ahead for a Really newbie question so here it goes, i bought a couple of your Jbf4fc from race day quads. In your manual you talk about bridging the board for 5v or 3.3v. My question is what if I don't do that at all? Will the output be 5v? Is that the default output? And is it (bridging) something you must do if your only gonna every use 5v peripherals and frsky\frysky receivers\ protocols? Thx for teaching me something today. Lol MICHAEL
Wow I did not know about this! Reminds me a lot of DJI and their "Smart Batteries" where they build most of the charger into the battery just so they can make extremely high margins on their batteries because nothing else will work with their quads. Again, inventing something that is not needed , purely for the sake of making their own product different, and increasing profit margins. (ALA Apple ) I guess it would be ok if every brand of batteries had this, but in the end, it just increases costs without much benefit. Most serious RC folks use good chargers, that monitor most of this anyway. Great video as always Joshua B.
I think this should be open sourced and slowly everyone should ad this to their batteries. I hope that manufacturers won't start adding random boards in their batteries... I like standards when it comes to things like this... and the only way to do that is to open source that.. :)
I share this sentiment. ISDT or whoever eventually brings a viable technology to market could still make a killing selling "upgrade kits" users can solder into all their legacy batteries to upgrade them. There's just no way they'll get any traction keeping this proprietary; it's frustrating seeing good ideas and hard work left to rot because the "business" people can't wrap their head around open standards or have a basic understanding of the LiPo economy.
LOL, been in FPV almost a year now. I have the BG-8S. Never knew about the battgo tech until now. That tells you that almost 2 years later, nobody cares that this tech exists, just like nobody cares that Traxxas has their own really cool charging connector. People want to stick with a standard.
I get that the parallel charging board couldn't (in the current incarnation) communicate between the batteries and the charger, *but*, that leaves the following questions... 1) Given that the BattGo chip resides 'on board' the battery itself, couldn't you still do parallel charging, and simply take advantage of the BattGo features to *monitor* the health of your batteries? 2) Does the BattGo protocol *allow* for multiple batteries through a parallel charging board that had the proper connections? Answering that would require more information about both the protocol and the chargers than is currently available. (There are dozens of communications protocols that involve fractional time sharing, or token sharing, or any number of other methods to send multiple independent signals across a shared bus, dating back far enough that they were used for networking in the days before the Intel 386 processor, and even the IBM PC. Those would be cheap enough in transistor count to implement in 'throw-away' cheap ICs.) 3) A (hypothetical) parallel charging board designed to with BattGo technology in mind might allow for passing a properly configured *summary* of the batteries up the wire to the charger, while configuring the individual ports appropriately at that level. Or, it could simply determine the number of batteries, multiply the charging amperage accordingly, and rely on a user only charging reasonably alike batteries on the same run (just like parallel charging boards do now). A final note: When you compared the voltage reported by the battery checker, and the voltage reported by the BattGo chip, you admitted that you didn't know how accurate those thousandths of a volt readings were, but *assumed* that they were more accurate than the hundredth of a volt readings from the BattGo chip. That may not be the case (though I'd certainly hope that the *charger* readings would be accurate). But, even if it were, the readings were off by approximately 0.03 - 0.04 volts (x.77x vs x.81). BattGo is very likely to be just a curiosity for folks in this hobby, but if it was designed with our use patterns in mind, we could still be surprised by future hardware.
ISDT has it's own (very solid btw) paralell charge boards. So maybe they implement BattGo into a new parallel charging board. Each plug has this third battgo serial wire. And the PCB collects the information of each smart lipo and sends it (via serial cable) to the charger. Makes that sense? :-D
They could include some bizarre protocol, like Dallas 1-wire to speak with up to 255 batteries whereas all the data cables will be connected together. It is hard to guess without documentation. But here is one more idea for parallel board: put 3 small and 1 big MOSFETS for each (4s) battery on your board to switch the balance and the main leads on and off if they're way off one from another. Or even better. One could put one more microcontroller into your parallel charge board. It will monitor the cell voltages and open or close corresponding mosfets for each battery. First disconnecting all but the most discharged then turning the batteries/cells on in correspondence with their voltages. As soon as it reaches the next (less discharged one), this next will be turned on in parallel (withot the pyro effects). The charger will ballance the batteries as usual, communicating digitally with the board, gradually increasing the charge current for every additional battery. The board can communicate with charger with some serial interface, multiplexing battgo data if exist/or needed.
Didn't wrote, that they have it already. But they should update it and make parallel charging possible with BattGo, as Joshua said. The JB board ist of course cheaper and has more features.
They are typically welded with a spot-welder. I apologize that this is going to sound condescending, but if you're having trouble getting the tabs to stick, my advice would be to stop. Building LiPo packs is potentially very dangerous. You really need to learn how to do it right and safely, not muddle through and hope for the best. It's not worth burning your house down over.
JB one of the affiliate links above flags the moment it's clicked, basically being blocked for malware. Not that this is on you but just thought you should be aware. (I think it was the last link provided) With the ad blocking enabled, this isn't an issue.
I just got one In the mail yesterday (ISDT charger). I'm kind of weirded out because I did not look this video up.. it's came up in autoplay after a different video about breaking in LiPos. I got my pd60 from Race Day Quads of course.. my go-to.
I get what you are saying about parallel charging but is it feasible that the micro controller within the battery can see a charge cycle and report back next time it is plugged back into a batgo device? You use a battery checker before every charge so can keep track of it. You'd be losing the auto detect settings but how often do they get changed! I get it its a cool idea, I even have the T8 charger but its a battery, it makes my quad go fast thats all i need it to do.
The battery will know how many charges it has had even if you parallel charge. It just won't have the nice feature of communicating automatically the charge rate and stop voltage.
They could just take a page out of BLHeli's book and have the BattGo transmit the info the same way BLHeli32 ESCs do with their telemetry wire. That way BattGo would work in parallel boards as well right?
So you could still parallel charge these, you couldn't get the charger to do any data but you could still use the cell checker to see about "events" and such which could be nice info to have. Or did you mean that the battery won't actually charge without the battgo connector getting info?
I like Kabab FPV’s thoughts on it, which boil down to: its unnecessary, ads cost and bulk/weight. There needs to be benefits to justify the costs. Though now I think about it, it could make for a really good tool for testing quads in real world tests for efficiency, amp draw etc. If say Tattu made a really high performance battery with BattGo for youtubers to test new motors with that could be cool. Getting solid numbers to see what battery is needed to run what setup could be really useful.
I think there is a lot of advantage to monitoring battery cycles and temperature, and logging overtemp events especially. You don't know how hot your battery is getting in flight, and overtemp is one of the surest ways to kill a pack. What about that one pack you ran down to 3.2 volts that one time. Which one was it? But the tech has to work reliably and accurately, and it's not there yet.
Joshua Bardwell hmm I guess it will come down to the end user. This tech is basically a black box for your battery and you’re super obsessed with black box logging on quads so it makes sense. Maybe the next product you develop should be an open source version of this “JB Black Box for Batteries” or something. Seems right up your alley.
What I feel I need as an FPV enthusiast is better capacity and current flow. Battgo It’s a cool concept but something I don’t really need as my lipos typically last a long time now that I stopped killing them. 😂. Who is going to innovate? Or is the need of the pilots separate from what the batt companies want or are even investing in?
I had to calibrate my ISDT BG 8s because it was not accurate. The method is the same as with Q8, I just had to go to system info. and press the middle button three times with a long hold and then I have the option to calibrate.
6 ปีที่แล้ว
As far as i understand the chip on the battery do the hard work. So we only miss the real time data reading when parallel charging, but the data are stored in to chip/battery. Am I right? I assume the temperature sensor is used for protect the chip/extra board while self discharging. There is not so much heat dissipation layer on the top of the battery.
+Péter Farkas when parallel charging you lose the ability to automatically read the preferred charge rate and temperature.
6 ปีที่แล้ว
Of course. The temperature would be great (plus one safety feature is always good ;) ). But the charge rate/current (calculation) can be tricky? What do you think what would be the proper charge rate if the charger get 2-6 different values? eg sum/avg (the lowest may get to much), n * lowest, all preferred charge rate have to the same? Or the parallel board can be so smart to change all batteries independently (like 6 ways charger), but that would cost why to much. But basically safety first: So we always have to smarter then the our changer and always double check the charging settings.
hey Joshua do you have any new updates on the battgo? have they fixed the different volt readings and stuff like that and if any other battery makers are using it yet?
I do agree with the point about parallel charging and i kind of want to pick one up with to see if i can find a way to do it. If you could reverse engineer the protocol and use an arduino reading the data you might be able to find the battery that's giving the most critical data then only relay that one to the charger and flip an led on for that port. so say a cell in one battery has an issue and gets hot, the arduino sends that batteries data to the charger and turns the led on so you can take it off the board and find out whats wrong. I doubt you could sell it because of intellectual property rights, but hey you could give the plans to a buddy if isdt doesn't make their own.
Wait. Auto storage discharge. Does that mean when it's just sitting there on it's own after X hours, it can discharge itself without any aid, down to 3.8? I don't see how that small PCB could do that but...if it could, besides being a little scary (a lipo, disconnected, discharging without you consciously being aware of it), that's pretty huge.
@@JoshuaBardwell good to know man because I'm guessin it's faster ! yeah I've had some explosions. never charging though just discharging too fast I guess .lol
Maybe some kind of modular charger like that charsoon magic cube thing would be good with this tech. I love the idea of being able to plug in 6 packs and press a 'go' button without thinking :)
I think another thing that’s a deal breaker is that you can delete all the exceptions so if u do one day sell it and u destroyed the batteries the buyer would never know becuase they can just delete the records.
Personally, a day or two is the longest I prefer to leave them. Best parallel charge board??? www.readymaderc.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=7159
From the perspective of our hobby, it's probably not good for anything more than monitoring battery condition. (Helping weed out abused packs before they destroy something like a quad or a house.)
No, I don't do that. Leaving the lipo fully charged does degrade its capacity somewhat, but we are at VERY low discharge rate, and the capacity of the battery is so high that it hardly matters. So when I first got the lipo for my Taranis, maybe it would last three months between charges and now maybe it only lasts one month, but who cares, it still lasts a month.
Educational and entertaining. As someone else was wondering, how does the auto storage work? Would it be possible for you to dive into that for us? That alone would be worth it to me
Okay can I still use this with a normal charger ? Because you could then charge it as normal. For me the built in storage charge feature is something that I find very appealing.
Cool so we just charge as normal parallel or other wise. I just really like the auto storage discharge one less thing to worry about. Is there any way to add the the storage feature to existing batteries ?
Still slightly better than sitting fully charged in storage for a month because bad weather stopped you from flying, and then life hit the fan. I can see the technology being useful from a battery *monitoring* stand point, even if it doesn't do much for us from a battery *charging* stand point.
Just a thought... it could be possible to treat batteries as USB connected devices for the purposes of Data collection / management during parallel charging. This would allow the batteries to log to a PC or another USB capable device.
You know what would be great? If all the greatest battery minds in FPV got together in a room to fix a technical problem and walked out with a certification racket lol.
I want to know how the battgo tech will work with parallel charging, how can it read the info from 4 batteries at once. Its a big deal breaker if you have to charge one at a time so the battgo info works right
Hi Joshua, Thanks for the review. One quick thing about measurement precision. Is it specified anywhere for battery and for charger/tester? I mean - if you've got a multimeter with higher than 0.5% precision - congrats, that's not the one from a few dozens of $ or £. And for 3.8V storage 0.5% means 0.019V so the actual voltage could be anywhere between 3.781V and 3.819V. Any thoughts?
I guess the thermister could be under the black board, putting it closer to the cells. Still not fantastic -- but I think this question was not really answered by a glance. This deserves getting answered by the vendor. Perhaps they were very smart about where they put the temp sensor... maybe they can provide some test data to support their implementation. Also, parallel charging -- you can still parallel charge the batteries dumbly, and since the smarts are in the battery, you can always get the meta-data out of the battery when you're curious. This seems like a likely use-case.
Oh no, another locked system... Open source or no buy. Have a bid-chip charger from early 2k, nerver used it as pointless vs the costs. For that you bought a chip for each battery pack, so could use any batteries still it was no go. Same issue, only one battery at a time. I've never charged one at a time frankly. I mostly charged in series back then as it charged dual 12s.
The main reason this won't fly in my opinion is, because batteries are more like disposables nowadays. When I bought my first 6S 5000 mAh battery, it was about 250,- EUR and I kept record of all flights and charges. Now those things are at 70 bucks. At that cost I really don't give a rick. If it endures a year, it is fine ;)
45 seconds in the video. Not the new best thing. Need special equipment and most batteries on quads get beat up over time. Bottom mount will kill this battery np
Joshua Have you seen the batteries from a Phantom Menace? One interesting feature was each cell is spaced from it's neighbour allowing more even cooling of even the inboard cells. It obviously adds bulk to the pack but I wonder if the idea would have any performance benefits on miniquad battery?
![[TH] 2024 PMSL SEA Finals D3 | Fall | รู้ผลทีมแชมป์ พร้อมตั๋วสู่ PMGC](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/7NxsN0Ch6vk/mqdefault.jpg)
Automatic storage discharge is what really caught my attention
The one thing that is a big plus is this technology is the temp sensor. Not for regular use or tracking but purely pure safety during charging. Heat is the first sign of a battery going bad on a charger and not having to add external temp sensors to achieve temp protection is a big plus. Other than that I agree with you comments Joshua. With more additions this can be a cool and useful new tech.
FinalGlideAus but what about if you live somewhere hot as balls like you right now. I’m from Chicago. Will the charger improperly treat a battery? I know very little about this. Not trying to be a smart ass, just asking an honest question. Love the new frame btw.
FinalGlideAus even better, what about a charger that measures mAh instead of voltage. Is it better to monitor mAh or voltage?
Too hot for a battery is too hot, regardless of ambient temp.
A good charger measures both but voltage is the important factor when charging as going over or under certain voltages is what can damage the cell and cause safety issues.
Betaflight should support it. So you will use battgo xt60 on you quad, connect those two small wires to FC and you will see cell voltage and cycles... :D
That's actually pretty clever. It would be amazing to get individual cell voltages without having a separate sensor, and to get battery temperature in flight.
Joshua Bardwell Joshua Bardwell yeah, now we just need to buy whole battgo technology from ISDT. Because their battgo lipo checkers will be pretty much useless.
Or we need someone smart that will copy code, But that will be illegal :/
BuzzCola 3 "Rewrite" 😂
The auto discharge is probably the most useful thing tbh... I wouldn't complain if all future lipo's had that tech
I'd need it to include an accelerator in order to tell me how many times I've crashed it.
yes and a gyro and some ESCs and a big mult-ipole connector... but if you also include the motors and the receivers and... and... then you don;t need any connector at all. :)
@@Siamect who needs a drone when you can fly your battery.
"BattGo isn't going anywhere" - Joshua Bardwell. Jokes aside, loving all your videos man. Very informative, straight to the point and as unbiased as it gets! Spent my whole evening consuming your content about parallel charging, chargers and so on 😆
I know that most of the guys with big drone channels are all smart guys. You aren't necessarily smarter than them, but always seem to think outside the box. I really like that about your channel. You test different things and ask different questions than the other guys. Sure you promote your stuff, but I don't understand why everyone acts like thats a bad thing. Subscribed.
We can make something very similar, or even better using a simple micro controller, like a PIC16F1827 QFN and a simple small board with voltage dividers, and adding a one wire interface so we can communicate with a set of batteries with its own ID or address, parallel charging them and communicating with them at the same time. And of course, OPEN SOURCE. I mean, is not that hard to do, the concept is pretty simple. Nice video Joshua :)
My favorite videos are these informative ones. Videos about the newest and possibly "greatest?" New tech. Reason being that we as a community are so eager to jump at the next big thing, that we sometimes find our selves a dollar short with or.... In our hands. But not today. Thanks bro.
at around 3:30 you say "charge at 2S". you mean 2C i think?
Drove me nuts, but I know he knew better.
Yes, you're right. That was a slip of the tongue.
Awesome lighting in this video!
I think you meant 2C and not 2S
feelsbadman
I have TH-cam Red...I forgot that TH-cam has ads..Lol it would be nice if isdt sold a one time license to battery manufacturers. Isdt chargers are some of the most popular chargers everyone seems to have. This tech is awesome and I think the success or failure is going to be determined by whether other battery manufacturers implement the tech. I agree, needs to be calibrated from the factory or user ability to calibrate. As far as parallel boards, it could be awesome. They could create a board that reads each batteries voltage and makes parallel charging even safer. They could make the charger send charge to different packs that are lower voltage until all the packs are the same voltage and then charge them all.
@Joshua Bardwell
I stand over a 5 gal bucket of water while I am disassembling batteries. One time, I shorted it, sparks flew, I flinched and dropped the battery in the bucket. Perfect :) Then i just add some salt and let it marinade.
wow..... things just get better and better...
Revolectrix "Bump" tags can be written, but only once.
It doesn't do anything other than identify the battery (for logging) and set the charger as you asked it to before writing the tag. So the default charging information is written in the tag itself.
There is no special circuitry in the battery, so no temperature exceptions, balancing or anything like that.
Don't take me wrong, I hate the idea if a iSDT proprietary protocol as much as you do, but if they do it with individual addressing capabilities then we don't need any balance cable and that would be good. And as someone suggested below somewhere, an extra FET on each connector of the smart parallel board would solve the problems with differences in voltages between the batteries when you start charging. All good...
I’m sure the next version will be better. I do like the idea.
Great idea but yeah not for miniquad pilots unless you spend all day charging one by one 👍
Oh spiffy background lighting! Looks really nice man. I really really like the self-discharge option of BattGo. My first thought when this video started was how it could handle parallel charging. It would be nice if it worked like Blheli32 ESC Telemetry, but the charger would have to be capable of talking to and reading from multiple batteries.
Holy! Your lighting is amazing!!!!
According to the BattGo website, the standard does support parallel charging, but I can't find a board that will do it.
yep, not even the original ISDT board has XT60-I plugs. I guess the battery will be charged like all other batteries by controlling individual cell voltage by the balance plug and the chip will record whether it is overcharged or over-discharged or any other event the internal sensors can record. The next time you plug it in a compatible device you will see all cycles and events that happened. Frankly the auto-discharge alone is worth the 2 extra dollars per battery.
Love the thumbnail this could become the best battery tech in a while if they're willing to take your advice.
If this uses the 1-Wire® standard or something similar there will be no problem connecting dozens of these battery cells to a parallel board.
As long as they don't, you know, all have the same ID.
The mailman is bringing something to measure voltage sweet!!
I liked your coverage of this Batt. I got all the info I needed thanks.
Wait. I'm not supposed to buy five batteries a month to enjoy the hobby?
KD Rush you buy 5 batteries a month!? :O
I should have enough to last for a few months now. This month I purchased five. Last month, 15. I was trying to hold out for the future battery tests Joshua plans on doing, but had a bit of battery bad luck. I'm the worst at battery management, and should really put a timer on the Taranis for the quads that don't have an OSD. The batteries might last a little longer. ;-)
Check the automatic discharge please. How does it work? I haven't seen any big resistor that could turn the over-voltage into heat - or is there something on the board under the board?
Also... self-heating batteries seem like another catastrophe waiting to happen
I guess there are some tiny little resistors on the chip that can consume some miliAmps. I heard that autostorage takes days to reach the storage voltage. Who cares how fast it is done, as long as it is automatically done and saves you time and money?
@@marchofer8829 time matters... you can't use it for charging while it's discharging. You mal also have a lot to discharge... You don't wanna wait days per batch
"You don't wanna go sticking any metal in here... if you short that you're gonna have a bad day"
Proceeds to stick a metal cutter right in there
Thank j.b i learned something this year lol HAPPY HOLIDAYS to you and yours many more!
Hi, do the xt60h(xt60+) exist in red and blue and black also wher can i buy this sleeves for the xt60h(xt60+) separately and the male or female xt60 separately?
Was super curious about this tech. Thank you for the informative video.
The link doesn’t work for the battery
But since the batteries do the monitoring and storage of the information, then you can parallel charge them on a different board and still get most of the benefit by having just a record of how many times they were overdischarged or overheated.
How hot does it get when it discharges the battery to get into storage that's one of my concerns you have a battery sitting there on your desk getting hot due to the fact it's just charging itself
Ok this might be flawed thinking but why not just use a traditional multicharge balance board it has the same effect of balancing the batteries, adding the middle input into a new board seems like a hat on a hat so to speak, Unless somehow the center pin is far more accurate than the balance port? .... And the tech is still cool, if I could get it from a different manufacturer I would like to try it, at least for monitoring the health of the battery which is important to me. That's why I keep track of the internal resistance and just placed an order for the isdt Checker you have. The real question is can these batteries even compete with R lines or w.e.? And is the extra weight worth it is balancing Beyond .000 necessary? This might be very cool on the new style of batteries with removable balance port cables, if you could balance charge with only one xt60 that would be complete Game Changer in my opinion if the battery manufacturer was good.. And affordable or worth the price....
Gen 1
Thanks for the look!
BMS on the RC LiPos... not a bad idea but I fear the auto-storage function.
Auto-storage means self-discharging. Self discharging means dissipating some heat in that well insulated BMS.
So, if the Q/C is not 100%, in theory at least, there are plenty ways for that BMS to shot a cell by accident.
Happens on well established phone batteries. Their BMS shorts out and the cell just...resigns.
There's another company that does something similar "SPEKTRUM S2100 Smart Charger & Batteries"....anyone using these 'Smart Batteries' and tech with their FPV Drones...can't find much out there on the internet specific to FPV and wondering if people are actually using this tech? I need a charger (new to FPV) and wondering if these are worth a closer look to simplify LIPO charging..
Thank You
Hi Joshua, i apologize ahead for a Really newbie question so here it goes, i bought a couple of your Jbf4fc from race day quads. In your manual you talk about bridging the board for 5v or 3.3v. My question is what if I don't do that at all? Will the output be 5v? Is that the default output? And is it (bridging) something you must do if your only gonna every use 5v peripherals and frsky\frysky receivers\ protocols? Thx for teaching me something today. Lol
MICHAEL
+DiciurcioCabinets MDiciurcio hmm you know I'm not sure. Check with your multimeter.
Wow I did not know about this! Reminds me a lot of DJI and their "Smart Batteries" where they build most of the charger into the battery just so they can make extremely high margins on their batteries because nothing else will work with their quads. Again, inventing something that is not needed , purely for the sake of making their own product different, and increasing profit margins. (ALA Apple ) I guess it would be ok if every brand of batteries had this, but in the end, it just increases costs without much benefit. Most serious RC folks use good chargers, that monitor most of this anyway. Great video as always Joshua B.
I'm lazy so I'd deffinitly buy those batteries
Sounds like a great idea, if you have the money to invest then I believe this idea is definitely a step or two in the right direction.
I think this should be open sourced and slowly everyone should ad this to their batteries. I hope that manufacturers won't start adding random boards in their batteries... I like standards when it comes to things like this... and the only way to do that is to open source that.. :)
I share this sentiment. ISDT or whoever eventually brings a viable technology to market could still make a killing selling "upgrade kits" users can solder into all their legacy batteries to upgrade them. There's just no way they'll get any traction keeping this proprietary; it's frustrating seeing good ideas and hard work left to rot because the "business" people can't wrap their head around open standards or have a basic understanding of the LiPo economy.
LOL, been in FPV almost a year now. I have the BG-8S. Never knew about the battgo tech until now. That tells you that almost 2 years later, nobody cares that this tech exists, just like nobody cares that Traxxas has their own really cool charging connector. People want to stick with a standard.
I get that the parallel charging board couldn't (in the current incarnation) communicate between the batteries and the charger, *but*, that leaves the following questions...
1) Given that the BattGo chip resides 'on board' the battery itself, couldn't you still do parallel charging, and simply take advantage of the BattGo features to *monitor* the health of your batteries?
2) Does the BattGo protocol *allow* for multiple batteries through a parallel charging board that had the proper connections? Answering that would require more information about both the protocol and the chargers than is currently available. (There are dozens of communications protocols that involve fractional time sharing, or token sharing, or any number of other methods to send multiple independent signals across a shared bus, dating back far enough that they were used for networking in the days before the Intel 386 processor, and even the IBM PC. Those would be cheap enough in transistor count to implement in 'throw-away' cheap ICs.)
3) A (hypothetical) parallel charging board designed to with BattGo technology in mind might allow for passing a properly configured *summary* of the batteries up the wire to the charger, while configuring the individual ports appropriately at that level. Or, it could simply determine the number of batteries, multiply the charging amperage accordingly, and rely on a user only charging reasonably alike batteries on the same run (just like parallel charging boards do now).
A final note: When you compared the voltage reported by the battery checker, and the voltage reported by the BattGo chip, you admitted that you didn't know how accurate those thousandths of a volt readings were, but *assumed* that they were more accurate than the hundredth of a volt readings from the BattGo chip. That may not be the case (though I'd certainly hope that the *charger* readings would be accurate). But, even if it were, the readings were off by approximately 0.03 - 0.04 volts (x.77x vs x.81).
BattGo is very likely to be just a curiosity for folks in this hobby, but if it was designed with our use patterns in mind, we could still be surprised by future hardware.
Dayum, got that Chad Kapper lighting going on!
ISDT has it's own (very solid btw) paralell charge boards. So maybe they implement BattGo into a new parallel charging board. Each plug has this third battgo serial wire. And the PCB collects the information of each smart lipo and sends it (via serial cable) to the charger. Makes that sense? :-D
It's possible. But damn if I'm going to pay their asking price for a 4-port parallel board.
Okay, thx. I buyed it. I'm a beginner AND a designer. So 4-ports are enough for me and it looks very nice and clean. :-D
They could include some bizarre protocol, like Dallas 1-wire to speak with up to 255 batteries whereas all the data cables will be connected together. It is hard to guess without documentation. But here is one more idea for parallel board: put 3 small and 1 big MOSFETS for each (4s) battery on your board to switch the balance and the main leads on and off if they're way off one from another. Or even better. One could put one more microcontroller into your parallel charge board. It will monitor the cell voltages and open or close corresponding mosfets for each battery. First disconnecting all but the most discharged then turning the batteries/cells on in correspondence with their voltages. As soon as it reaches the next (less discharged one), this next will be turned on in parallel (withot the pyro effects). The charger will ballance the batteries as usual, communicating digitally with the board, gradually increasing the charge current for every additional battery. The board can communicate with charger with some serial interface, multiplexing battgo data if exist/or needed.
The ISDT Paralell Charge Board does not support BattGO... it is just a regular Charge Board... The JB Board is so much better...
Didn't wrote, that they have it already. But they should update it and make parallel charging possible with BattGo, as Joshua said. The JB board ist of course cheaper and has more features.
Hey Joshua, do you know how to solder to those batt tabs i cant get any solder to stick to mine (3 different batteries) even at 800 degrees
They are typically welded with a spot-welder. I apologize that this is going to sound condescending, but if you're having trouble getting the tabs to stick, my advice would be to stop. Building LiPo packs is potentially very dangerous. You really need to learn how to do it right and safely, not muddle through and hope for the best. It's not worth burning your house down over.
JB one of the affiliate links above flags the moment it's clicked, basically being blocked for malware. Not that this is on you but just thought you should be aware. (I think it was the last link provided) With the ad blocking enabled, this isn't an issue.
I just got one In the mail yesterday (ISDT charger). I'm kind of weirded out because I did not look this video up..
it's came up in autoplay after a different video about breaking in LiPos. I got my pd60 from Race Day Quads of course.. my go-to.
I get what you are saying about parallel charging but is it feasible that the micro controller within the battery can see a charge cycle and report back next time it is plugged back into a batgo device? You use a battery checker before every charge so can keep track of it. You'd be losing the auto detect settings but how often do they get changed!
I get it its a cool idea, I even have the T8 charger but its a battery, it makes my quad go fast thats all i need it to do.
The battery will know how many charges it has had even if you parallel charge. It just won't have the nice feature of communicating automatically the charge rate and stop voltage.
They could just take a page out of BLHeli's book and have the BattGo transmit the info the same way BLHeli32 ESCs do with their telemetry wire. That way BattGo would work in parallel boards as well right?
So you could still parallel charge these, you couldn't get the charger to do any data but you could still use the cell checker to see about "events" and such which could be nice info to have. Or did you mean that the battery won't actually charge without the battgo connector getting info?
No, the battery will charge.
But the cool feature where it will automatically tell the charger what amps and voltage to charge to won't work.
So... potentially still decent for monitoring battery health, but absent a BattGo-capable parallel board, not so helpful for charging?
I like Kabab FPV’s thoughts on it, which boil down to: its unnecessary, ads cost and bulk/weight. There needs to be benefits to justify the costs.
Though now I think about it, it could make for a really good tool for testing quads in real world tests for efficiency, amp draw etc. If say Tattu made a really high performance battery with BattGo for youtubers to test new motors with that could be cool. Getting solid numbers to see what battery is needed to run what setup could be really useful.
I think there is a lot of advantage to monitoring battery cycles and temperature, and logging overtemp events especially. You don't know how hot your battery is getting in flight, and overtemp is one of the surest ways to kill a pack. What about that one pack you ran down to 3.2 volts that one time. Which one was it?
But the tech has to work reliably and accurately, and it's not there yet.
Joshua Bardwell hmm I guess it will come down to the end user. This tech is basically a black box for your battery and you’re super obsessed with black box logging on quads so it makes sense.
Maybe the next product you develop should be an open source version of this “JB Black Box for Batteries” or something. Seems right up your alley.
You had me at auto-discharge.
not autodischarge, auto self storage
GrumpyDude it doesn't auto storage, only autodisharge to storage voltage.
Looks like you should work with them for your V3 parallel board. If anyone can do it it's you man.
How much power draws the PCB with Controller itself?
I just measured it at 5.87 mA at 15 volts.
What I feel I need as an FPV enthusiast is better capacity and current flow. Battgo It’s a cool concept but something I don’t really need as my lipos typically last a long time now that I stopped killing them. 😂. Who is going to innovate? Or is the need of the pilots separate from what the batt companies want or are even investing in?
I had to calibrate my ISDT BG 8s because it was not accurate. The method is the same as with Q8, I just had to go to system info. and press the middle button three times with a long hold and then I have the option to calibrate.
As far as i understand the chip on the battery do the hard work. So we only miss the real time data reading when parallel charging, but the data are stored in to chip/battery. Am I right?
I assume the temperature sensor is used for protect the chip/extra board while self discharging. There is not so much heat dissipation layer on the top of the battery.
+Péter Farkas when parallel charging you lose the ability to automatically read the preferred charge rate and temperature.
Of course. The temperature would be great (plus one safety feature is always good ;) ). But the charge rate/current (calculation) can be tricky? What do you think what would be the proper charge rate if the charger get 2-6 different values? eg sum/avg (the lowest may get to much), n * lowest, all preferred charge rate have to the same?
Or the parallel board can be so smart to change all batteries independently (like 6 ways charger), but that would cost why to much.
But basically safety first: So we always have to smarter then the our changer and always double check the charging settings.
Ditching BattGo: The quickest way to drop 5 grams from any quad ! :-p
hey Joshua do you have any new updates on the battgo? have they fixed the different volt readings and stuff like that and if any other battery makers are using it yet?
Nothing has changed as far as I know, and I doubt it will.
I do agree with the point about parallel charging and i kind of want to pick one up with to see if i can find a way to do it. If you could reverse engineer the protocol and use an arduino reading the data you might be able to find the battery that's giving the most critical data then only relay that one to the charger and flip an led on for that port. so say a cell in one battery has an issue and gets hot, the arduino sends that batteries data to the charger and turns the led on so you can take it off the board and find out whats wrong. I doubt you could sell it because of intellectual property rights, but hey you could give the plans to a buddy if isdt doesn't make their own.
Wait. Auto storage discharge. Does that mean when it's just sitting there on it's own after X hours, it can discharge itself without any aid, down to 3.8? I don't see how that small PCB could do that but...if it could, besides being a little scary (a lipo, disconnected, discharging without you consciously being aware of it), that's pretty huge.
+cheesebanana it dies it very slowly.
What's the difference between spektrum smart batteries.
now HH and spektrum have bought in this will become more widespread.
I’m so confused did spektrum steal this technology? Or are they affiliated?
Be aware from where you get the ISDT chargers. There are cheap copies that do not have all the features. It happened twice to me !
ive always charged at 1.3 for 1300mah or 1.5 for 1500mah or 2.7 for 2800mah . u mean i can go higher without damage?
It's possible to charge up to 2C or maybe even 5C without damaging the packs. But if the pack is not healthy you can cause a fire this way.
@@JoshuaBardwell good to know man because I'm guessin it's faster ! yeah I've had some explosions. never charging though just discharging too fast I guess .lol
Maybe some kind of modular charger like that charsoon magic cube thing would be good with this tech. I love the idea of being able to plug in 6 packs and press a 'go' button without thinking :)
Awesome!!!
I think another thing that’s a deal breaker is that you can delete all the exceptions so if u do one day sell it and u destroyed the batteries the buyer would never know becuase they can just delete the records.
When referring to the charge rate as 3S as changing to 1 or 2 did you mean to say C? I thought C was the charge rate and S the cell count.
Yes. I meant to say 3C.
Josh, what's your limit on letting fully charged batteries set without use? Also , can u recommend a good parallel charge board . Thx
Personally, a day or two is the longest I prefer to leave them.
Best parallel charge board???
www.readymaderc.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=7159
Joshua Bardwell ...thx
I think it's a nice idea but I don't see it taking off at all...
Maybe in really large expensive packs but not for our drone batteries
From the perspective of our hobby, it's probably not good for anything more than monitoring battery condition. (Helping weed out abused packs before they destroy something like a quad or a house.)
Theo Brinkman I think they'd be better off integrating a low voltage alarm into the XT60 or adding an internal resistance alarm of some sort
Hey JB if you use a lipo in your transmitter or fpv goggles do you have to keep taking out after every use to put at storage voltage
No, I don't do that. Leaving the lipo fully charged does degrade its capacity somewhat, but we are at VERY low discharge rate, and the capacity of the battery is so high that it hardly matters. So when I first got the lipo for my Taranis, maybe it would last three months between charges and now maybe it only lasts one month, but who cares, it still lasts a month.
Any new updates on this smart technology?
Educational and entertaining. As someone else was wondering, how does the auto storage work? Would it be possible for you to dive into that for us? That alone would be worth it to me
It just discharges a small amount of current through a resistor or some similar load on the board.
Hello Joshua, you acting speak 2s,3s when talking about charging. That should be 2c,3c?
+Fate T. Harlaown you're right.
Now I don't know anything, But can you get an accurate temperature by measuring the resistance of the battery? Let me know.
No, it doesn't work like that.
Okay can I still use this with a normal charger ? Because you could then charge it as normal. For me the built in storage charge feature is something that I find very appealing.
Yes, you can charge it normally.
Cool so we just charge as normal parallel or other wise. I just really like the auto storage discharge one less thing to worry about. Is there any way to add the the storage feature to existing batteries ?
+Jonathan jrdevalk in theory you could solder on the circuit board.
I think you didn’t stress enough that the auto discharge timer actually discharges the lips without it being connected to the charger....
Wonder how auto discharge to storage works. How fast can it drop the voltage without generating too much heat. That feature would alone be worth it.
nehe1234 yah, or a fire risk? scary!
The load resistor heats up a bit but not too much. It takes a few days to get to storage though.
Still slightly better than sitting fully charged in storage for a month because bad weather stopped you from flying, and then life hit the fan. I can see the technology being useful from a battery *monitoring* stand point, even if it doesn't do much for us from a battery *charging* stand point.
@Joshua: Really? I cannot see a load resistor on that tiny PCB board. Where is it? Where will the heat go?
I'd like to put that electronics into my batteries in DIY variant :)
Just a thought... it could be possible to treat batteries as USB connected devices for the purposes of Data collection / management during parallel charging. This would allow the batteries to log to a PC or another USB capable device.
You know what would be great? If all the greatest battery minds in FPV got together in a room to fix a technical problem and walked out with a certification racket lol.
I want to know how the battgo tech will work with parallel charging, how can it read the info from 4 batteries at once. Its a big deal breaker if you have to charge one at a time so the battgo info works right
You can still charge, it just doesn't read the charge rate and voltage.
Hi Joshua, Thanks for the review. One quick thing about measurement precision. Is it specified anywhere for battery and for charger/tester? I mean - if you've got a multimeter with higher than 0.5% precision - congrats, that's not the one from a few dozens of $ or £. And for 3.8V storage 0.5% means 0.019V so the actual voltage could be anywhere between 3.781V and 3.819V. Any thoughts?
I am working on an update video to address these questions.
I guess the thermister could be under the black board, putting it closer to the cells. Still not fantastic -- but I think this question was not really answered by a glance. This deserves getting answered by the vendor. Perhaps they were very smart about where they put the temp sensor... maybe they can provide some test data to support their implementation. Also, parallel charging -- you can still parallel charge the batteries dumbly, and since the smarts are in the battery, you can always get the meta-data out of the battery when you're curious. This seems like a likely use-case.
Lipobench is on hold because Ramon has health issues within his family, and he's moving. Expect him to return with more testing once he gets settled.
When you say charge current of 3s do you mean 3c?
Yes.
Oh no, another locked system...
Open source or no buy.
Have a bid-chip charger from early 2k, nerver used it as pointless vs the costs. For that you bought a chip for each battery pack, so could use any batteries still it was no go. Same issue, only one battery at a time. I've never charged one at a time frankly.
I mostly charged in series back then as it charged dual 12s.
Not helping with parallel charging, but not preventing it either, right?
+DerClaudius correct.
The main reason this won't fly in my opinion is, because batteries are more like disposables nowadays. When I bought my first 6S 5000 mAh battery, it was about 250,- EUR and I kept record of all flights and charges. Now those things are at 70 bucks.
At that cost I really don't give a rick. If it endures a year, it is fine ;)
45 seconds in the video. Not the new best thing. Need special equipment and most batteries on quads get beat up over time. Bottom mount will kill this battery np
Joshua Have you seen the batteries from a Phantom Menace? One interesting feature was each cell is spaced from it's neighbour allowing more even cooling of even the inboard cells. It obviously adds bulk to the pack but I wonder if the idea would have any performance benefits on miniquad battery?
Now a 1300 mAh battery going to cost you $90. Per battery nw
so we looking at lipo that is like the dji phantom lipo??