Uh... Charging Works Now?!

In my previous entry, I mentioned that I was having trouble charging the batteries. Well, after doing pretty much nothing, I figured I'd try charging it again this morning just to see if anything changed, and... it worked?!

I don't know what I did differently this time, other than slightly changing the way I was terminating the CAN bus. The physical format of CAN is simply two wires, connected to every device on the bus. Both ends of the wire need to be terminated in a 120-ohm resistor. One end is terminated inside the JIB-H9 box that I bought from FlashDrive motors (this one) meaning that I needed to terminate the other end of the bus myself. I originally was (attempting) to do this by just sticking a 120-ohm resistor I had lying around into a spare deutsch connector that plugged into the bus, but maybe the electrical contact there was bad. This time, I had the end of the bus landed into a terminal block that the resistor was much more firmly clamped into.

Either way, I'm not going to think about this too much, but now I'm in that weird territory where my stuff works, and I have no idea why.

It did afford me the opportunity of learning more about how to work with the CAN bus in Arduino, however. I had to write up some code to see if the BMS was even sending any CAN messages over the bus that the charger was able to read.