Re: Lee Hart & Battery Management Systems

[Lee Hart <leeahart@earthlink.net>]

My thanks to Daniel Ames, Neil, Wicai, Jim Coate, and others who asked
about my Battery Balancer.

I really don't have any plans to sell it as a commercial product. It's a
hobbiest project, built to serve my own needs, with no market research
to see if it would satisfy anyone else.

It is built in ways that make it easy to build one, but hard to build
many. For example, I used a $100 UL listed multimeter with isolated
RS-232 serial port as an isolated way to sense battery voltages. A
commercial product would use a $10 A/D converter and optocoupler
circuit. I used a $50 BASIC Stamp microcontroller so it's easy for a
hobbiest to program. A commercial product would use a $5 custom
programmed microcontroller.

I'm perfectly willing to sell the bare boards, parts, schematics, etc.
to
interested, knowledgeable individuals who are capable of building and
programming it themselves. At present, it costs about $600 for the
control board and $175 per 8 batteries for the relay boards. But you
would need to be able to build a project from just the plans in a
magazine, and who doesn't need a lot of hand-holding, and who will
provide useful feedback so I can improve the design.

The problem is that I'm not a company, and so don't have the resources
to make it a commercial product with the level of fit, finish, manuals,
and customer support people expect.
-- 
Lee A. Hart                     Ring the bells that you can ring
4209 France Ave. N.             Forget the perfect offering
Robbinsdale, MN 55422 USA       There is a crack in everything
(612) 533-3226                  That's how the light gets in!
<leeahart@earthlink.net>                Leonard Cohen