Developer CallMeC has designed a battery management system (BMS) into the buswork for a lithium battery pack, and made the design open source via GitHub.
-Lithium batteries are popular for many applications due to their high energy density and efficacy, but in order to make them last a long time require a BMS to mitigate against imbalances in the cells, as well as to control charging and discharging.
This design integrates all the required BMS functionalities onto a printed circuit board, but also adds the high power busing normally taken care of by heavy copper strips or nickel ribbon.
As well as making the battery packs easier to construct, the design could also speed the development of other BMS-equipped battery packs, such as those made from 18650 cells, or even larger cells from electric vehicle batteries.
