Orion BMS 2 Chademo Troubles

Development and discussion of fast charging systems eg Chademo , CCS etc
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willman3755
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Orion BMS 2 Chademo Troubles

Post by willman3755 »

I'm finally adding Chademo charging to my '78 MG Midget that has a forklift motor and a 24kWh (about 14kWh usable today) LEAF pack.

One thing to note first off is that my pack is only 32s or 134V fully charged, ~100V totally dead. I'm aware that many Chademo stations only support 200-500V, but the ones near by me are mostly ABB Terra 53 50kW that say 50-500V 125A on their nameplate. Not sure if anyone else has experience with these particular chargers in low-voltage conversions like mine, but based on the nameplate it should work fine...

I've probed all the Chademo signals (names here are relative to the Orion BMS Chademo Integration doc and basically I see:
- Orion pin 26 (Multi Purpose Enable) starts out pulled to ground because the BMS is happy.
- Start/Stop 1 goes high when I hit start on the station, closing the contactor control relay
- Charger and car do a bunch of CAN communication (I have logs captured from the Orion BMS)
- Several seconds later, the Charging Enable pin (pin 4 on Chademo/pin 6 on Orion) is still not pulled down by the Orion and the charger times out and stops giving 12V on the Start/Stop 1 pin.

On the CANbus comms, the big red flag I'm seeing is the 0x109 message has the EVSE_STATUS_INCOMPATIBLE bit thrown. Is the nameplate claiming the charger works down to 50V a complete lie???

Any help debugging this is much appreciated. I'm really hoping I'm doing something wrong here and it isn't that the stations near me just won't support such a low voltage.

Other useful info:
* Chademo signalling pinout and description
* https://openinverter.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1472
* https://github.com/mdrobnak/can-dc-fc-r ... ms_loop.rs
* https://github.com/mdrobnak/can-dc-fc-r ... cess_cd.rs
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Re: Orion BMS 2 Chademo Troubles

Post by rstevens81 »

This may not be what you want to hear....

Basically chademo chargers lie although the specification states down to 50v they dont work till 250-300v, (as OEM's don't go below 80s) (EVSE_STATUS_INCOMPATIBLE is a big hint here).
I know its frustrating even zero motorcycles had to withdrawal their chademo charger because of this!

Damian, Colin Kidder (& the late jack rickard of EVTV) had experience of this deviation from the standard with EVTV's JLD505 and there are some big rants by jack saying what's the point of a standard if you don't follow it!

You have only a few choices that mainly aren't cheap and you'll need to decide which is best for you:
1) Since your i assume your in North America the only thing i could suggest is as you have 80A 240v (split phase) [but i don't know about how comonplace chargers of this type are] is to buy a bigger charger and fast charge maybe 3x the 6kw elcon's (definitely not cheap as most oem chargers don't go down that low)
2) Bigger battery so you don't need fast charging i.e. tesla modules but then you'll end up replacing the BMS as you would probably need to run 2 stings in parallel.(5+5 or 6+6)
3) try and source an old High voltage version of the zilla but that tops out at 300v and you'll need to replace the BMS and wouldn't be able to use a whole string and also Chademo might not work even then as you'll below oem voltages!

The main thing probably is to decide your usage envelope i.e. do you really need chademo? how far you you actually drive each day? is it cheaper/more sensible to just rent a car when you have to go state to state?
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Re: Orion BMS 2 Chademo Troubles

Post by celeron55 »

I use Chademo succesfully practically everywhere with my 72S pack, so basically 230V empty. I wouldn't try anything lower than 200V. And for CCS, for anyone wondering, 250V is definitely the minimum.
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Re: Orion BMS 2 Chademo Troubles

Post by Jack Bauer »

I'm going to need a hacksaw
willman3755
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Re: Orion BMS 2 Chademo Troubles

Post by willman3755 »

Well - this was what I was worried might be the issue. Dammit Chademo!

I also have an IONIQ 5 so I'm not adding Chademo to this car for practical reasons; mostly I wanted it so I could reasonably drive it to EV events more than 50 miles away without hours of L2 charging.

I already have one TSM2500. Perhaps another one for $500 would make sense to add, then I can fully charge in just a couple hours from typical L2 chargers (6kW instead of 3kW is a big difference).
willman3755
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Re: Orion BMS 2 Chademo Troubles

Post by willman3755 »

I may also look into reconfiguring my pack back to the full voltage 96s, but for driving splitting it 3:1 (or maybe 2:1) with some contactors. I think the interlocking for this should be doable off the charging vs driving contactor outputs on the Orion; the main thing is what the Orion thinks of balancing/sense wires being tied not in series suddenly...

I really would like to keep my existing controller and forklift motor. It has been the same since 1992/50k miles and is "historical" at this point...
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