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A project log for Model S BMS hacking

Reverse engineer, reprogram or otherwise use the UV/OV/balancing circuits built into each of the 16 modules in a Tesla Model S battery pack.

jarrodJarrod 03/28/2016 at 20:120 Comments

Did some probing of the BMS and tracing out of the isolated circuitry, I think I have figured out how the basic communication bus SHOULD work..

Looks like Tesla have powered down the uC and isolator chips to save energy when the car is turned off, they do this with a switch between the IC Vss/gnd and the TI BMS IC's Vss/gnd, looks like U5 and U5 are the switches. U2 appears to be a voltage regulator (judging by the heat it produces when powered on.)

They have an oscillator which enables the isolator IC periodically, if the bus side of the isolator is powered, pin 14 will be pulled low, this then enables the uC and isolator until the isolated bus is unpowered and pin 14 goes high impedance. When it poweres up, the uC flashes the onboard LED, but it doesn't send out any data, in fact it pulls the data line low..

Pin 17 of the uC is connected to an output channel of the isolator, pin 16 is connected to an input, these are UART TX/RX pins so it's a safe bet that some serial protocol is used to enable the board and read out data. and it's not just a simple

Unfortunately it's going to take a long time to brute force the serial baudrate and combination of bytes which makes data flow.. so this is a dead end unless I can get my hands on a working Tesla with it's pack ripped open to probe the bus.. Anyone?

Otherwise plan B is to write my own code to run on the Silabs uC and interface with the BMS IC.

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