VCU as a BMS main on the CAN bus

[TommyB]

Hello everyone,

in the Johannes VW touran update he started using MEB battery platform modules in his conversion and from what I gathered from the video and on the wiki, he is directly using the VCU as the master BMS to use with the BMS slaves that come with each module.

Now my situation is similar as in my conversion I will be using MEB modules (got the whole ID4 battery pack 82kw for dirt cheap).

Now before buying a bunch of parts, i have questions:
1. The obvious question is what are the downsides to this route of implementation? From what I gather there might be that ID can clash if there are more devices on the network, but Johannes has a bunch of stuff and it seems to work fine for him.

2. If I go this route the idea would be to try to implement this into Zombie, unless I missed something and there is this option already and that probably answers all my questions. It has SimpBMS support, but from what i understands it for "high level" CAN commands not BMS slave management.

3. Plan B which is probably plan A, get the same-ish setup as Johannes is using and start hacking away for stuff i need.

Any suggestions, solutions, ideas or already WIP things that can help are very welcome.

[johu]

Attached is a CAN log of all 9 modules connected to CAN bus. There you can check for ID clashes.
I didn't get any, maybe because VW maintain a table of all IDs they ever used?

Even the small BMS that only monitors one module sends out messages for 4 modules. So it's like 12 modules.

The code of mebbms.cpp could also be ported to Zombie. It generates the high level values

https://github.com/jsphuebner/stm32-car/tree/touran-meb

[tom91]

You will need to code your own master, even if you use Zombieverter. Zombieverter code base will never swell to include "BMS master" functions, the one that is maintained and released by the OI community (Damien and others)

The best route to take if you want to use the Zombieverter is to create your own BMS master for the VW MEB pack based off the SimpBMS open source code or Johannes VW code.

SimpBMS code for interfacing https://github.com/Tom-evnut/VW-bms/tree/master/VWBMSV2