Hi Guys,

I am looking to make a RS485 cable that would allow me to get detailed battery parameters from my Shoto batteries.

My neighbor was so kind to borrow me this USB to RS485 converter:

 

He works in industrial automation so I am sure this unit should be fairly bullet proof.

I've been struggle to get the battery and PC to talk using software called Battery Studio (given to me by a friendly forum member ) which it apparently what I should use for Shoto.

I have no way for confirming if this is the correct software as Google doesn't even know.

 

I found this pin-out diagram, but I am unsure if the RS485-A and B should go to more than one pin on the RJ45 connector?

This RS485 converter does have a ground lead, should also be connected to more than one pin, as per the diagram?

 

Does anyone perhaps own a SolarAssistant cable for Shoto, how are these wired up?

I just spoke to someone that will not be named at one of thr Shoto Importers in Pretoria. 

He is apparently not allowed to share the BMS computer software to anyone who is not an installer. (Maybe I should have lied about being an end user) 

He did however tell me that Battery Studio won't work on the 5.12's

Not sure what the thinking behind this closed ecosystem is. 

 

I have the same batteries as you and is interested in this as well.  Could an off-the-shelf cable like this work? https://www.geewiz.co.za/converters-and-splitters/107148-microworld-usb-to-rs485-converter.html

On another thread I've been referred to BatteryView software ... not sure if if will work on Shoto though. 

Hi Scuba,

I guess this converter could work providing you have the correct pin-out that matches what the Shoto battery accepts and have the correct software.

So far I haven't been able to confirm that I have the correct pinouts or software. 

I tried all possible combinations of the pinouts to the RJ45 I found in the above screenshot without being able to connect using Battery Studio.

I know that the Solar Assistant cable does indeed work, hence asking for pictures of the RJ45 side to help be reverse engineer it and build my own cable.

if using the rs485 port that device will work, if you need to use the rs232 for pc connection then it wont , there are devices that can comminicate via either rs232 and rs485

i just got a rs232 to usb adapter, now i just need the software to see i i can succesfully connect, if anybody perhaps has the software to share or can perhaps point to name

 

it seems i should have read more before posting , ie measure twice cut once

 

it seems the rs232 and rs485 are same type of communication method

rs232 is one way and rs485 bidirectional from what i read (slalt lots of salt)

 

i have been able to see the pack, when using my rs232 connection on the rs485 port with home made cable and using software of the eg4 LL 

can't get any info from the pack yet, but can see that it sends and receives , if i unplug it while connected to com port i can see the pack disapears 

 

so progress is happening, assume it could be that i need the correct software  to interpret the data its receiving m14

 

if anybody has pc software for a shoto let mne know i have a shoto sda10-48100

You've tried PBMSTools?

Hi Guys,

 

I am glad this conversation started up again.  I had an interaction with a friendly young man called Kobus from Solar Europea few months ago.

He shared the in-out of the cable he uses for the Shoto batteries as well as the software needed.  I never tested it, but here are the pictures of the RS485 cable.

It looks to be pin1 and 2 on the RJ45.

 

 

yea no luck on pbmstools

 

i used pin 1/2 as TheoVogel posted above

 

i unfortunately could only get my hands on an rs232 to usb at a local pc shop

so not sure if that is hindering my success

 

if you could share the software it would bel ovely

 

the pins on the rs232 port ie rj11 is pins 3/4 according to the manual (i double checked and just realised i accidently made mine wrong so quickly gonna redo the rj11 and try again on rs232 port)

and on the rs485 is 1/2

 

ok thanks for the bouncing board guys

would not picked up on my accidental incorrect cable

, success on pbmstools via the rs232 rj11 phone plug port on pin 3/4

or should i say i  get the monitoring screen to show data at least

On 2022/07/28 at 3:31 PM, Leondavibe said:

success on pbmstools via the rs232 rj11 phone plug port on pin 3/4

Thanks for this valuable info, good to know pbmstools works on rs232. I tried for a couple of weeks to get rs485 to work (my bat only has can & 485) and tried every possible combination of pins and a bunch of software and my conclusion now is that it's my cheap USB-RS485 converter with only 2 pins, so don't buy one of these if you try it. (edit2: this was an incorrect assumption)

If you do manage to get RS485 working, then please update here as then I might consider buying another converter.

Edit: also kinda confirmed by @TheoVogel in the image above with a 5 pin converter

 

Edit2: this was incorrect, I did manage to get this adapter working in the end, see further below.

Edited August 28, 20223 yr by jumper

4 hours ago, jumper said:

Thanks for this valuable info, good to know pbmstools works on rs232. I tried for a couple of weeks to get rs485 to work (my bat only has can & 485) and tried every possible combination of pins and a bunch of software and my conclusion now is that it's my cheap USB-RS485 converter with only 2 pins, so don't buy one of these if you try it.

If you do manage to get RS485 working, then please update here as then I might consider buying another converter.

Edit: also kinda confirmed by @TheoVogel in the image above with a 5 pin converter

from what i have been able to gather it seems the 485 adapter may work on the 232 port too

from what i have googled they are essentially both serial connection the one just has more capabilites thus can communicate with mulltiple devices

ie why you can have so many slave batteries connected via 485 port

also what i have picked up from monitoring the shoto,

 

it is looking like balance function seems to be set to kick in at 3.6v per cell (on my specific model- i did factory reset it though)

 

the battery still shows as charging and over voltrage protection kicks in 

that is probably why the model i have 15s 4.8kw says the minimum charge voltage is 53.2v

 

that would explain hiow some of my cells could have drifted apart

 

if the previous owner tried to extend the life of the battery by using the guidelines of 20-80% soc they woulkd inadvetedly

cause the balance function never to be enabled causing imbalance (the little that it can balance)

 

now at first i thought the ovp function it enabled at 3.6v was the protection function that stops the charging fuction

whatching it for a while, it becomes clear it's most likely the balance function cause as soon as it starts the cell that peaks start changing according to the software

and still charges until 3.7vi sh and then switches of charging

 

only after using a daly for a while did i notice that it has a default discharge cut-off of 2.2v per cell (different battery diy one )

so silly the settinfgs that is on some of these bms's

On 2022/07/31 at 12:55 PM, Leondavibe said:

from what i have been able to gather it seems the 485 adapter may work on the 232 port too

I'm not sure that would work as they are technically different hardware protocols and likely expecting different software protocols too. I can't test that as I don't have a RS232 port.

What I have managed to gather points to this being a full-duplex vs. half-duplex issue. RS232 is full-duplex (can send and receive simultaneously) and RS485 can be both. With this type of adapter there is only D+ & D- Tx & Rx, not Tx+, Tx-, Rx+, Rx- (& GND) like the 5 pin adapter. Apparently the Tx+ & Rx+ (also Tx- & Rx-) are joined on the board which makes it only run in half-duplex (cannot send & receive simultaneously) mode which doesn't work with these batteries or any setup requiring full-duplex. I found this out eventually because it is not even possible to do a simple loopback test with a jumper cable, even though the site I bought it from gave instructions how to do it (never mind that it uses completely different drivers too, but that's another nightmare).

 

Edit: Correction: we are using half-duplex (2 wires), full-duplex uses 4 wires, but it still stands that the joining of the wires on the 2 pin usb converter messes with the way it works as far as I have been able to find.

Edited August 2, 20223 yr by jumper

21 hours ago, jumper said:

I'm not sure that would work as they are technically different hardware protocols and likely expecting different software protocols too. I can't test that as I don't have a RS232 port.

What I have managed to gather points to this being a full-duplex vs. half-duplex issue. RS232 is full-duplex (can send and receive simultaneously) and RS485 can be both. With this type of adapter there is only Tx & Rx, not Tx+, Tx-, Rx+, Rx- (& GND) like the 5 pin adapter. Apparently the Tx+ & Tx- (also Rx+ & Rx-) are joined on the board which makes it only run in half-duplex (cannot send & receive simultaneously) mode which doesn't work with these batteries or any setup requiring full-duplex. I found this out eventually because it is not even possible to do a simple loopback test with a jumper cable, even though the site I bought it from gave instructions how to do it (never mind that it uses completely different drivers too, but that's another nightmare).

 

Edit: Correction: we are using half-duplex (2 wires), full-duplex uses 4 wires, but it still stands that the joining of the wires on the 2 pin usb converter messes with the way it works as far as I have been able to find.

i connected my rs232 device to the rs485 port and could get a connection of some sorts in other battery software , obviously  i tried different ones since i have not been able to get the shoto software, i could only see the pack and that it was sending and receiving data, but could not get more out of it

 

after picking up i accidently used the wrong pins on the rs232 port , i tried it again with some success with pbmstools ie can only get statistics

 

my initial opinion was as you have it

6 minutes ago, Leondavibe said:

i connected my rs232 device to the rs485 port and could get a connection of some sorts in other battery software

This is very interesting info indeed, I have a rs232 to usb, but never bothered to try it, I will when I get my system running again, hopefully this week.

I tried the rs485 converter with a few different com sniffer apps and got absolutely nothing, but it's not possible to test if it's actually working without another device because it can't send and receive at the same time. I tried installing the drivers the supplier's site recommended, but just got a blue screen of death, so gave up after having to reinstall windows.

You say you managed to read the pack info which is all I am hoping to achieve right now, so I'll have another crack at it. Thanks!

22 hours ago, jumper said:

This is very interesting info indeed, I have a rs232 to usb, but never bothered to try it, I will when I get my system running again, hopefully this week.

I tried the rs485 converter with a few different com sniffer apps and got absolutely nothing, but it's not possible to test if it's actually working without another device because it can't send and receive at the same time. I tried installing the drivers the supplier's site recommended, but just got a blue screen of death, so gave up after having to reinstall windows.

You say you managed to read the pack info which is all I am hoping to achieve right now, so I'll have another crack at it. Thanks!

win 10 picked up my usb serial adapter, it seems the quality of some these devices ain't great ie i would get device not recognised error messages , unplug try a different ports until it works , then after the pc sleeps same musical chairs until it works again

2 hours ago, Leondavibe said:

win 10 picked up my usb serial adapter

Yeah it did with mine too and assigned FTDI drivers and it seemed to work, assigned com port and com sniffer app could see it and send data, but when I couldn't receive anything from the battery or do a loopback test I went back to the site I bought it from and saw they say it uses a CH340 device and drivers (apparently inferior to FTDI), so I downloaded those and when I tried them I got BSOD. I think in the end Windows was right and the site is wrong and it's probably a FTDI chip (or clone maybe).

After this I did more research on doing a loopback test with 2 wire RS485 and found out that it's not possible because it is set to "No Echo" so when the serial port is transmitting data, the receiver is disabled (Source1,Source2). I found out it might be possible to turn on local echo on the ftdi chip, but that involves changing a bit in the eeprom and I'm not going that far just yet.

I might try and wire my USB-RS232 straight to the USB-RS485 and see if I can send & receive that way just to see if it works and then I'll know if I have the correct driver and can move on.

5 hours ago, jumper said:

Yeah it did with mine too and assigned FTDI drivers and it seemed to work, assigned com port and com sniffer app could see it and send data, but when I couldn't receive anything from the battery or do a loopback test I went back to the site I bought it from and saw they say it uses a CH340 device and drivers (apparently inferior to FTDI), so I downloaded those and when I tried them I got BSOD. I think in the end Windows was right and the site is wrong and it's probably a FTDI chip (or clone maybe).

After this I did more research on doing a loopback test with 2 wire RS485 and found out that it's not possible because it is set to "No Echo" so when the serial port is transmitting data, the receiver is disabled (Source1,Source2). I found out it might be possible to turn on local echo on the ftdi chip, but that involves changing a bit in the eeprom and I'm not going that far just yet.

I might try and wire my USB-RS232 straight to the USB-RS485 and see if I can send & receive that way just to see if it works and then I'll know if I have the correct driver and can move on.

forgot to mention anything higher than 9600 baud rate my connection fails, obviously my battery model specific, just thought to mention

https://solar-assistant.io/shop/products/shoto

 

I would just buy this 

9 hours ago, Hansa said:

I would just buy this 

Didn't they teach you in school that buying the answers is cheating? 🤪

I already used up my 50/50, now I'm asking the audience, I'm saving my "phone a friend" for last 😁

Jokes aside, this has been a great learning experience on how serial comms work and using an adapter will allow me to connect to other batteries with different pinouts in future.

At the moment all I'm wanting to do is record my readings when my battery is new and check them intermittently and if things get out of balance I'll worry about it then and maybe in the meantime they will add shoto support on the axpert king and then I'm sorted.

Updating here as I have finally managed to get the 2 wire USB-RS485 adapter working with my shoto. Thanks to @jetleewho gave me the names of drivers that worked for his Narada battery on another topic, I found an extra driver from Device Monitoring Studio that must have been conflicting.

The drivers needed for this FTDI adapter should be automatically installed/found by windows: ftser2k.sys, serenum.sys, ftcserco.dll, ftserui2.dll

Once I found out that the shoto uses a Seplos 100A BMS I managed to find a ton of info on diysolarforum and on boards.ie, so shout out to those guys over there, they've done a lot of research on the seplos.

The pinout is as follows: Pin 1 on the RJ45 plug goes to B (D-) on the adapter and pin 2 goes to A (D+)

You can also use pins 8 & 7 (respectively) instead as the pinout is mirrored on RS485 port. I've actually used 1&8 for D- and 2&7 for D+ for a better connection with these flimsy wires as they are joined anyway as per the image below.

The software needed to connect is called "Battery Monitor V2.1.8" by Seplos and you can find all the necessary info and files here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10pxgNLHovcDZRVGrCZsSkfecBrRw-AdW

Please read the manual before playing around as there are some things that need to be set up before connecting to the battery and make sure you set the baud rate to 19200.

All the info you need, including 6 temp sensors, SOC, Cycles, real time logging and lots more:

 

Enjoy!

 

Good effort