BMS Wiring aplenty

We are trudging our way through the BMS wiring as you can see.  There are many wires that need to be terminated correctly and hidden as well as possible, since we always believe half the battle is aesthetics.  The cell level terminations are coming along nicely, but the wiring harness wiring is another story altogether.  We found that the wiring had been done "backwards" from the diagram, if that was not bad enough, during testing of the harnesses, a ground lead accidentally touched a high voltage lead causing quite a spark, so we are getting a new set of harnesses and connectors.  Lessons learned!

The BMS wiring has begun!

Well, it is finally time to begin the daunting task of wiring the Orion BMS in the MR2.  We took a while to figure out exactly how the wiring would have to be done including the routing of the wires from each cell back to the BMS.  Thanks to the excellent customer support of Andrew at Orion, he approved our wiring diagram, and away we went.
    The first hurdle was that the front battery box would have to be wired prior to installing into the car.  To accomplish this, we had to pre-wire it with a separate harness that could be plugged up when the box was back in the car.  In the pictures, you can see the students crimping each connector for the primary harness.  We are almost ready to wire the BMS harnesses.  What is really nice about this experience is how the students have stepped up to learn about the system and how the wiring process should be staged for completion.  After the wiring is complete, we will have a chance to test the harnesses prior to plugging them into the BMS.  Stay in tune, there is more to come!

Battery re-installation

After a two months of research and design.  Careful consideration has been put into the BMS system and wiring of the unit and and batteries.  We top balanced the 48 cells and let them stay wired in parallel over the last two months.  Now we are prepared to re-install the batteries and label them for the wiring of the Orion BMS.  We cleaned each cell, labelled them and installed them back into the battery boxes in the correct orientation.  Our next step is to carefully wire the harnesses for the BMS.