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the8bitlegend

Member
Joined
Oct 4, 2024
Messages
16
Location
Holland, Michigan
Hi fellow iMiEV owners! I recently bought a used 2012 ES that's charging to 15 to 20 miles for $1000, and am hoping I can maintain enough perseverance to improve this thing.

I will likely be posting information as I learn more about my new vehicle, and will be visiting as frequently as I have been for some months now as a lurker, since I enjoy reading about and taking inspiration from the odds other owners have managed to overcome.
 

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Hey! I saw a similar slamming deal up for sale nearby and I couldn't commit to it.

We ended up with a black 2012 from Zeeland, but it has new batteries per Mitsu's recall as of 2022.

What might be obvious to you is that your battery is getting quite old! If you poke around the forum here, you will find that some very committed folks have helped with performing an upgrade to newer battery tech. I recommend checking it all out! I'm on mobile, or I would link.

Let me know if you ever want to meet up and talk MiEVs! I'm local to West MI, as well.
 
Hey! I saw a similar slamming deal up for sale nearby and I couldn't commit to it.

We ended up with a black 2012 from Zeeland, but it has new batteries per Mitsu's recall as of 2022.

What might be obvious to you is that your battery is getting quite old! If you poke around the forum here, you will find that some very committed folks have helped with performing an upgrade to newer battery tech. I recommend checking it all out! I'm on mobile, or I would link.

Let me know if you ever want to meet up and talk MiEVs! I'm local to West MI, as well.
Cool to see someone else from the area on the forum

Between my initial posts and recent, I've swapped in a new aux battery (the original was dated from 2013), put in LED headlight bulbs, and charged it from ~20% SoC as often as was practical. It's definitely got the original cells, but every day its top % creeps up as cell 7 inches closer to the rest of them in voltage, and my range this week has been between 36 and 42 miles, depending on how much of my driving beforehand was on the highway.

There was a black 2012 on marketplace that must have since sold, which I had my eye on, but I decided to gamble on this one instead.

Hope you're having a happy Thanksgiving, and thanks for reaching out!
 
Sounds
Cool to see someone else from the area on the forum

Between my initial posts and recent, I've swapped in a new aux battery (the original was dated from 2013), put in LED headlight bulbs, and charged it from ~20% SoC as often as was practical. It's definitely got the original cells, but every day its top % creeps up as cell 7 inches closer to the rest of them in voltage, and my range this week has been between 36 and 42 miles, depending on how much of my driving beforehand was on the highway.

There was a black 2012 on marketplace that must have since sold, which I had my eye on, but I decided to gamble on this one instead.

Hope you're having a happy Thanksgiving, and thanks for reaching out!
Sounds like your gamble worked out! Pretty sure we have the black 2012 you were looking for...

Lately it's been discharged 10% or less and recharged which has been awful leading into the cold here.

Best of luck!
 
charged it from ~20% SoC as often as was practical. It's definitely got the original cells, but every day its top % creeps up as cell 7 inches closer to the rest of them in voltage, and my range this week has been between 36 and 42 miles, depending on how much of my driving beforehand was on the highway.
Looks like your battery capacity needs updating, what is its current value (in Ah)? There are ways to calibrate the battery in one go if you don’t want to do this gradually.
 
Looks like your battery capacity needs updating, what is its current value (in Ah)? There are ways to calibrate the battery in one go if you don’t want to do this gradually.
I'm usually using CanIon when i'm connected to the obd2 device, so I don't have a solid timeline of the Ah reading while I've owned this car, but just a few minutes ago I got 28.8 on OBDZero.

I've been hesitant to speculate as to whether there was going to be anything else worth getting back into place with the battery, since I've seen well beyond my expectation occur in terms of the one suspect cell measurably returning to equivalent margin of error that the rest of the cells have been hovering at between when I bought the car and today. I fully expected I'd have to crack open the module and manually swap out (if I found a worthwhile replacement) cell 7, or at least manually charge it to a desired voltage before linking it back into the series, which would have been a substantial auto repair oriented moment in my life.
Less than that, but another speculation that had been proposed here, which I think you participated in the thread of, was the task of setting up a can bridge (if the case was that the cell reading was simply a sensor error) which would be a little more up my alley, since I only bought this car after a long history of electronics tinkering and repair, which segued into buying and restoring a fully electric moped, which was a crash course of its own in battery maintenance anywhere near the caliber of even a small EV.


If, right now, my cheap-as-all-get-out purchase of a MiEV that was charging to 11 ish miles of estimated range was still charging up to that abysmal state but otherwise showing no signs of serious degradation, I'd be putting some consideration into manually calibrating the battery as a semifinal resort, or would maybe otherwise put an arduino into a hardy, life-in-a-car-proof-ish shell with a little code that makes it spoof what would hopefully have otherwise been an accurate measurement if not for a presumed sensor malfunction. That said, for some reason, as circumstance in that "mean time" period I was calling it before inevitably doing one of those things or more would have it, treating the car like I have has both covered every base I have needed in the driving portion of my life, while consistently showing me unexpectedly good results.

Between my last comment and tonight alone I've been using the car to drive to work and back consistently, and get an estimated range between 45 and 55 miles, with a top SoC of like 98%. I'm feeling a bit confident (but hopefully not to a fault) that the voltage range which started between .28V and .35V and is now hovering around .04V will eventually reach the lowest it can possibly hit within a month of properly driving and charging.

Next spring I'll get the moped's battery series in after manually parallel balancing them all, and will be so happy to be dealing with just 72V this time.

Attached are screenshots of tonights Ah page on OBDZero, tonight's Battery State page on CanIon, and an older screenshot of the same page (early October of this year) to highlight the difference in Voltage range between then and now.
 

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I'm usually using CanIon when i'm connected to the obd2 device, so I don't have a solid timeline of the Ah reading while I've owned this car, but just a few minutes ago I got 28.8 on OBDZero.
CanIon keeps a record of Ah changes, see ‘Ah history’ tab
Less than that, but another speculation that had been proposed here, which I think you participated in the thread of, was the task of setting up a can bridge (if the case was that the cell reading was simply a sensor error) which would be a little more up my alley, since I only bought this car after a long history of electronics tinkering and repair,
Turns out this wasn’t a CMU fault and a CAN bridge would not have been suitable to ‘fix’ this..
Between my last comment and tonight alone I've been using the car to drive to work and back consistently, and get an estimated range between 45 and 55 miles, with a top SoC of like 98%. I'm feeling a bit confident (but hopefully not to a fault) that the voltage range which started between .28V and .35V and is now hovering around .04V will eventually reach the lowest it can possibly hit within a month of properly driving and charging.
Looking at your screenshots, it appears that cells #41-43 are higher than the rest and therefore stopping the charge prematurely, balancing doesn’t seem to affect them, however the difference is merely 10mV and not worth any intervention.
Attached are screenshots of tonights Ah page on OBDZero, tonight's Battery State page on CanIon, and an older screenshot of the same page (early October of this year) to highlight the difference in Voltage range between then and now.
A great example of the ‘self heating’ function if you have the time and patience to let the BMU do it’s job.

If you want to know how far your Ah will go eventually, run CAP2 procedure in OBDZero.
 
CanIon keeps a record of Ah changes, see ‘Ah history’ tab
gotcha. i got a screencap of that page.
Turns out this wasn’t a CMU fault and a CAN bridge would not have been suitable to ‘fix’ this..
Oh undoubtedly. Still appreciate the willingness of community members to help brainstorm root causes and potential solutions when it was still more murky.
Looking at your screenshots, it appears that cells #41-43 are higher than the rest
It's 41-44, then again between 84-88
I figured that had something to do with each set of four belonging to those two modules that house 4 cells each, and whereabouts they sit in the series during charges and discharges, or maybe how a set of four is treated by its respected allocation of charge given or taken as opposed to the majority of the modules, being sets of 8, regarding them sitting higher in voltage by a smidge.
and therefore stopping the charge prematurely
Well, by that standard, every battery module in existence stops charge prematurely, though I guess that means it's subjective to say so or not, but I get you. It's for the same reason that I've been focusing on cell 7 rising from a much greater margin, which, like how manually top or bottom balancing a series of cells can both bring the total margin in, was, and, though less so, still is my greater concern for the time being, if I'm trying to improve my total battery capacity.
however the difference is merely 10mV and not worth any intervention.
100%
if you have the time and patience to let the BMU do it’s job
It has been my vague understanding that the BMU does the standard version of its job when the car is allowed to sit charging up to and past a couple of spots on the way to full charge, and maybe again at max charge if left plugged in longer. I've seen people post the balancing spots being at both 20 and 30 percent, and at both 70 and 80 percent.

Either way, I remember the first time I saw the car's amp draw drop to near zero for about fifteen minutes while at a charging station, and later realizing it wasn't some sort of computer malfunction.
If you want to know how far your Ah will go eventually, run CAP2 procedure in OBDZero.
I might. I just don't expect this particular car to do much better than what I'm starting to hit right now, but I know if I'm willing to step outside a few times one of these nights after getting the car near dead for the night, I can get some data from it.

I've just been in this cycle of seeing increasingly positive results week after week, and telling myself how it's been worth it at each one of those moments. It's all felt like bonus gains since the first time I saw this car hit 20.
 

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Balancing is only done at the top after reaching 100% SoC, the pauses you mentioned are used for the BMU to determine (no load, voltage based) SoC.
I appreciate the clarification

The two four cell modules are no different than the other ten.
I was mostly just speculating, because the only thing that's clear in regards to any pattern existing is that it's two sets of four modules, and they happen to sit at the four end spots of the first and second halves of the 88 total cells. I didn't even know if they came from the four cell modules to begin with, but felt drawn to that assumption based on what I'm looking at.
I know that the cells in those two modules are no different than any of the cells in the other 10, and if I had never been presented a line graph with those two sets of peaks for this long and consistently, I would continue to believe that everything in the car that in any way affects the battery module wouldn't discriminate in any way between the ten sets of eight and the two sets of four, but something's up.
 
I would continue to believe that everything in the car that in any way affects the battery module wouldn't discriminate in any way between the ten sets of eight and the two sets of four, but something's up.
If you have a consistent offset across the same cells @various SoC levels then it’s most likely a CMU issue.

Anecdotal ‘evidence’ seems to suggest that the 4 cells modules are more likely to develop such issues although they use same PCBs (but with less components).

I would therefore not rule out that this is what you’re seeing. As mentioned, it’s a non issue presently, but it’s likely to get worse. In my case one cell eventually drifted to 100mV above the rest at all times and caused the charging process to stop ‘prematurely’ thus limiting the pack’s capacity.
 
There is a guy over on the nissan laef forum that is trying to balance up his pack.
https://mynissanleaf.com/threads/fi...the-hv-battery-without-battery-removal.36975/


He is putting the car into READY mode and letting it sit 24/7 with occasional L1 charging and a short drive as needed.

The balancer uses 10x lower current than in the Mits. So far he has brought up the laggard about 2mV per day.

i wonder if this would work on our cars too?
 
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Leaving it on a charger 24/7 is pointless, but driving it a bit or turn on the heater to reduce the SoC every now and then, should work..
Mickey is spot on. If the problem conditions are just right for allowing the BMU to correct it over time, discharging and allowing ample enough time for a full recharge and balance period can bring outlying cells closer to where they should have been. It only creeps up, but charge/balance after charge/balance gives back those precious mVs
 
Did i say leave it on the charger? NO

Leave it in READY mode. Did you not go read his post?
I did, but a triplet doesn’t balance in READY (according to flags read out with Diagbox), it only starts the process after being charged to 100% with the cable still plugged in.

How long it tries to balance before it times out, I don’t know, hence leaving it ‘charging’ 24/7 afterwards is pointless.

IIRC HobDrive (& MUT3?) have a ‘voltage smoothing’ feature that allows balancing to take place any time (a bit ‘hit and miss’ to get it working though)
 
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