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French firm Gouach is pitching an Infinite Battery with replaceable cells

195 points by pabs3 1y ago

neilv 1y ago
I wonder how much they will have to protect against recklessness of the e-bike owners? For example, against the end user sourcing substandard cells, and combining them in inadvisable ways. I don't have a good profile of e-bike owner behavior about maintaining their own equipment, but what I can say is fewer than 1/5 of e-bikes will stop on red at a 3-way intersection near me (when cars are stopped in the parallel lane, and pedestrians are crossing). We also see a lot of riding on sidewalks, at speed, to bypass red lights and traffic on a major street here. That said, the e-bike riders are often wearing helmets as they plow through pedestrians, so maybe their recklessness only extends to the safety of others, and they'll be conscientious about not lighting a lithium battery fire between their own legs.
serf 1y ago
it's a cool idea for small setups, but very expensive per kwh. if you want the same kind of style diy-er box-for-batteries I suggest the Trampa offerings. Similar focus on safety and novice level DIYer capability but much larger capacities and arrangements.
- oulipo2 1y ago
  Very nice battery boxes! Our product is expected to go down in price as we increase the production. Our product also comes with a high-end connected Battery Management System (the "brain" of the battery), and with a sturdy and fire-resistant aluminum casing!
jfim 1y ago
I wonder if this will allow flying with an ebike battery in disassembled form. The regulations allow up to 100Wh per battery, and an unlimited number of batteries, so transporting the individual cells should be okay, at least in theory.
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  Lugging an entire suitcase full of 1 kWh worth of batteries might not technically be against regulations, but I imagine you'd be signing yourself up for a long series of headaches at the security checkpoint anyway. To be honest, if I knew that security wouldn't stop me because "it's not technically against regulations", that's exactly what I would do if I wanted to bring down a plane.
  - jfim 1y ago
    Right, that's basically the problem, if one wants to travel by air with an ebike without hassle, there's no real option to do so. There's the Ligo 10X (https://ebikes.ca/product-info/grin-products/ligo10x-battery.html https://ebikes.ca/product-info/grin-products/ligo10x-battery...) which makes 99Wh battery packs that can be connected together, but otherwise it just seems like rules lawyering. There really needs to be standardization of battery packs for ebikes instead of proprietary ones, so that one could rent a battery at their destination.
    - kevincox 1y ago
      At that point why not just rent the whole bike and not need to bring the large object onto the plane?
      - pmg101 1y ago
        Because ones bike is a carefully selected item perfectly fitted to ones body shape and preferences, whereas the battery is simply a line replaceable unit.
        lm28469 1y ago
        That's such an edge case though.... what about my fine tuned piano? Or my aquarium? At some point personal luxuries don't have to be accommodated for
        1y ago
consp 1y ago
Balancing will be a nightmare I guess, or just dont do it. Nice idea for the advanced user but I would not let my parents fiddle around with lose 18650 cells for the sake of their house burning down. I see a niche application but personally hope they get it to market and make it compatible with Shimano. My double sized battery is a frankenbattery: pcb from original with custom printed case fitting onto the original attachment device using the batteries from two original batteries. Measured and balanced of course. Safety is "meh" I guess because DIY. I'd like to replace it with something more properly designed.
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago
  I did my masters thesis on how to balance batteries with very little information on each individual battery a-priori! Unfortunately I didn’t get to do experimental stuff because it was the middle of Covid, I only had simulation data. You can do some interesting things, though I wonder how many issues we missed/avoided by working only in simulation. Edit: here’s the publication if you’re curious: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405896320323879 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240589632... Edit-edit: wow I got two citations!!! Never thought anyone would read my paper, that’s amazing.
abdullahkhalids 1y ago
An ebike is very weight sensitive. How much extra weight does this innovation lead to? I would rather have the whole battery be replacable. And when you want to replace, you trade-in your old one for a discount on the new one.
- swader999 1y ago
  Very little I'd bet and location of the weight is far more critical to overall utility. Hopefully this is well thought out.
- amluto 1y ago
  > An ebike is very weight sensitive. E-bikes tend to be quite heavy, and many of them have designs that are very much not optimized for weight. > I would rather have the whole battery be replacable. They are. And the replacements are single-source and are very expensive.
  - gonzo41 1y ago
    To a degree yes, however I have an ebike and the bosch battery with a it has a 500W battery which is about equiv (if my math is right) to a 28 Ah ryobi drill battery. Those don't exist btw, but if i wanted one and bought 7 4Ah batteries to get the same effect they would cost more than the single ebike battery. As a single item they are pretty well priced for the power they offer.
    - andreareina 1y ago
      I think those batteries have their own BMSs, plus casing etc, that adds to the cost. The story as I can understand it is about being able to swap out individual cells which won't have those overheads.
- Johnny555 1y ago
  Pedal powered bikes are very weight sensitive. The average e-bike (at least one that would use a fat battery pack like the on pictured in the article), are less weight sensitive. The RadKick 7 (which RadPower calls a "lightweight bike" weighs 55 lbs. Racing bikes like the $10K Trek Domaine Carbon weighs less than 30 lbs, but has a much slimmer (and lower capacity) battery pack than what Gouach seems to be targeting.
ortusdux 1y ago
I like the idea of Batteries as a Service, and I could see it working in some US cities for scooters. https://www.gogoro.com/ https://www.gogoro.com/ Many consumers just don't want to worry about battery health. Reportedly, battery degradation anxiety is driving down used EV prices in the US.
- contrarian1234 1y ago
  Gogoro is a borderline scam. There are not multiple battery providers. You can only get batteries through gogoro and they dictate the price (it govt fixed for X amount of year and then who knows what happensl. Till recently you couldn't charge the scooter/batteries at home (even now it's made impractical) You in effect are renting your vehicle It's only successful in Taiwan due to slick marketing and intense nationalism
- edg5000 1y ago
  In China they have car battery swap stations. For such batteries, owenership does not make much sense, so a subscription model indeed seems logical. The monthly fee covers the cost it takes for the company to replace worn cells; electricity could be charged separately for cars. For scooters, since the batteries are easy to swap yourself, buying and swapping a new battery is not that big of a deal, so I don't see subscriptions working as well there as for cars.
  - oulipo2 1y ago
    (Gouach co-founder) Yes! Our battery would be perfect for a swap business, they could easily fix damaged batteries, repair cells (only $50, instead of buying a new battery at $300 retailer price), and at the end, they could even retrieve used cells to sell them back for energy storage applications!
- oulipo2 1y ago
  (Gouach co-founder here) A lot of people would prefer to not have to care, but many of them do care because they know it's the major "consumable" part of their $3000+ e-bike investment, and they want to know if it will last long, if it's robust, and if it can be repaired in case it's needed Additionally, we've seen more and more customers wary of the environmental and social cost (children mines, etc) linked to lithium batteries, and who are looking for more durable solutions
swader999 1y ago
This is a great idea. Would be wild if they could support switching on the fly between 32 and 48v for a range/speed option. That gets complicated though.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  Most e-bike providers will buy their switching logic based on the voltage in use, a driver for 48V would be substantially more expensive than one for 32V. There is also the whole charger setup to consider so yes, that gets complicated.
- fennecbutt 1y ago
  Doesn't need to. Power is power.
  - aetherspawn 1y ago
    This guy is right, the premise of switching doesn’t make sense, power is power.
    - swader999 1y ago
      I only remember when I built my own batteries, I would get more range at lower volts because at about 40+km/hr you end up pushing wind and range goes way down. So yeah, technically power is power, but it's fun to go 50km/hr if you don't have far to go.
      - numpad0 1y ago
        There probably aren't many EVs that can't regulate voltage across motor poles between 0 to +battery pack(or -1/2 to +1/2 pack) voltage...
      - andreareina 1y ago
        Did your controller only have one power setting?
Liftyee 1y ago
Let's hope the inane DMCA laws don't get them for decrypting the Bosch battery-motor communication. If HN had profile pictures, mine would be a Clippy.
Animats 1y ago
Is this a problem due to bad cell quality control? Car-sized lithium batteries are lasting 200,000+ miles. Why aren't e-bike batteries?
- lallysingh 1y ago
  How many cycles does the ebike battery go through in 200k+ miles? An EV car does ~300 miles/cycle. So 200k miles = 667 cycles.
  - gonzo41 1y ago
    i get about 90km of range from a 500Wt Bosch battery. Thats running at full power the whole time.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      That is amazing performance. I usually get about half that.
      - gonzo41 1y ago
        I usually ride faster than the motors limit, so it's really just acting like a push, and most of the battery is spent dragging me up a really big hill i live on. Everywhere I ride down in town is pretty much flat.
    - ul5255 1y ago
      With 600Wh battery and Shimano Steps E5000 in lowest support level I can easily ride 250km/charge
  - jve 1y ago
    Cycles is not the only variable in play here: - Depth of Discharge - how often you go from full to low battery? Going twice from 80->30 (which accounts to a single cycle) is much better than single 100->0 cycle - Thermal management - what are cell temperatures when battery is being charged? Maybe it is charged in direct sunlight? This will kill battery pretty fast. At what temperatures are the cells when driving the ebike? - Ebike/scooter probably being charged to 100% more often than necessary. - Did you leave your battery at winter completely discharged or fully charged in your garage? Bad. TLDR: Info I gathered about reading how to take care of Lithium NMC batteries which are so widespread.
jmclnx 1y ago
I think it is a pretty god idea. It may remove quite a bit of battery waste.
awongh 1y ago
It would be cool to see a fully open source ebike. Sort of like a framework (the hardware company) of ebikes.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- andreareina 1y ago
  What would you like to see beyond what you can already do, i.e. buy a bike (or frameset, wheelset, groupset) and conversion kit?
  - throwaway34564 1y ago
    I think the proposition is an open-source "conversion kit". Battery, charge controller, motor controller, sensors, display, source-code, specifications, etc. Built with some sort of standard so parts are easy to swap/extend. I like the idea
  - awongh 1y ago
    Like it's mentioned in the article the motor controllers themselves are closed source so they have to hack the protocol in order to plug the battery into it. What if all the software and hardware systems of the bike were open source, not just the battery.
- oulipo2 1y ago
  We're only working on the battery, but we plan to open-source at least the app and make the communication protocol extensible with "plugins", in order to let users configure their batteries for any controller protocol!
aetherspawn 1y ago
This is such a terrible idea because the packs have to be factory balanced before assembly, and everyday Joe doesn’t have the equipment (or probably the understanding) to do this part properly. If the packs are not perfectly balanced, the batteries just short into each other and explode, and BMS can’t do anything because there isn’t any per-cell switch (cost). It’s not just a matter of balancing voltage either, the cell profiles (voltage vs SOC) have to be the same otherwise you end up with 1 cell doing all the work. Simply put, when you mix and match cells of different brands, models, or even ages, they don’t integrate evenly. This results in a few or even just 1 cell doing a majority of the work during both charge and discharge, maybe 10x higher than its safety rating, guaranteed fire… Also end-user is expected to do the math and input the battery’s total current rating into the motor controller? Yeah, nah, a hundred kids will think it’s cool to set this too high and set themselves and people around them on fire.
- trenchpilgrim 1y ago
  The Toyota Prius community already has a better solution for this - You can buy remanufactured batteries, then send your used battery back to get a credit. ChrisFix on YouTube has a swap guide for DIYers - it's mostly taking all the interior panels out of the back of the car.
  - oulipo 1y ago
    (Gouach co-founder here) This is nice, but when you have an e-bike with a malfunctioning battery that you use for work everyday, you don't want to have the 2/3 months it generally takes for exchange programs. Plus, once you sent your battery, they either discard it which is not ideal for the environment, or try to remanufacture it, which is very dangerous when it's done on a battery which wasn't designed for it, like ours
- beefnugs 1y ago
  Sounds like a challenge: start monitoring individual temperatures, long term recording of performance down to the cell, recommend a mAh value of cell in a particular location, dynamic ohm chips in series with batteries to control differential discharging. I am not enough of an expert to know if all this could work, but its got to be better than replacing an entire pack at a time to be worth trying
elahieh 1y ago
A cryptography angle in the article. Would this be illegal in the US under DMCA? One of the biggest compatibility challenges, Vallette said, was finding a way to work with Bosch's mid-drive motors. The communications between a Bosch motor and battery are encrypted; after "a serious effort," Gouach's app and battery should work with them, Vallette said.
- jMyles 1y ago
  ...uhh, yeah, certainly seems like a buried lede. What precisely can I do with Gouach's app and a Bosch mid-drive?
  - oulipo 1y ago
    We managed to reverse-engineer the protocol and to make our battery communicate with the Bosch controllers!
    - clumsysmurf 1y ago
      What happens when Bosch changes the protocol / encryption just for the heck of it, are you guys back to square one?
      - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
        > What happens when Bosch changes the protocol / encryption just for the heck of it Bosch old batteries don’t work with their own new controller anymore. Not saying it will never happen but Bosch can’t do that every week either.
        wongarsu 1y ago
        And there'd still be all the already sold controllers, including brand new bikes at retailers. These things don't exactly have over-the-air updates, they are designed to just work forever with the firmware they ship with
vallettea 1y ago
alex vallette here (cofounder and ceo): shipping in the usa will resume in september. we had to suspend because of tarifs but now we have a warehouse on the east coast so things should be much more optimized as the tariffs will apply only on cost of goods ans not on the consumer price. subscribe to the newsletter to stay tune (we only send one mail every two weeks)
- torginus 1y ago
  Hi! Thanks for coming here. I have a question - how does the device aid in identifying in which cells have gone bad, and then do the necessary rebalancing to match the load level of the cells in the string? Also, cell replacement is a concern in EVs that placing in a cell of different make and age to the existing ones will mean that cell will have a different charge curve to the others, making very easy for the pack to go 'out of sync' again. How do you address this issue? You also mentioned that you spent a huge amount of time on making sure the contacts stay in place during the shaking that comes with riding a bike - which is super important as jumpy contacts could cause DC arcing which is a fire hazard. How would you ease the concern that such a thing absolutely cannot happen?
  - oulipo2 1y ago
    (Gouach cofounder) There's an app which shows you the voltage level of each cell, and the battery will auto-rebalance them! For second-life cells, you indeed have to match the cells, we don't necessarily expect people to do that themselves, but we will partner with battery recyclers to get second-life cells, test and match them, and sell back those packs at a lower price as an additional revenue stream for the recycling industry! Our battery would be perfect for this kind of use-case For the shaking of contacts, rest assured that: our batteries get tested by third-party authorities like any other batteries, and go through intense stress-test (check https://www.instagram.com/p/C-c_NEbtE4N/ https://www.instagram.com/p/C-c_NEbtE4N/ for an example) And as a second proof, our batteries have been in use in a free-floating mobility startup, Pony, for around 3+ years, they have been subjected to all kind of heat, cold, rain, snow, people kicking bikes, people throwing bikes in the river, etc, and they are working great!
lentil_soup 1y ago
>> It keeps you updated on the status of cell performance and heat through a Bluetooth-connected app why an app? Why not a simple light or error code on device?
- WinstonSmith84 1y ago
  1- might make the (waterproof) case harder to build 2- finding the right dead battery among 18650 batteries is requiring more hints than just "something is wrong" 3- marketing / convenience and probably you can order your dead battery straight from the app 4- monitoring battery charge, battery life / cycles / etc. 5- no idea :-) Just speculating, but I guess there are a lot of reasons why a bluetooth app makes sense
  - juliangmp 1y ago
    I think the idea might be that you don't need to check the battery health yourself but instead you get pinged when a cell's getting close to dead
  - thmsths 1y ago
    Your second point made me chuckle ;)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- nandomrumber 1y ago
  Bluetooth connect apps are pretty much commodified at this point. If one product has an app, and the next one doesn’t, people will choose the one that does.
- LeifCarrotson 1y ago
  Why not both? I'd love an error LED to tell me something's wrong, maybe (maybe) with complicated blink codes that I can count and recount to determine which cell is bad or what action to take, but I also want a Bluetooth app to access the actual data: live cell voltages, currents and temperatures, estimated storage capacity and cell health, lifetime charge cycles and total power delivery... Give me all the data! I don't want to increase the cost and complexity, and reduce the runtime of the thing with an onboard tiny LCD and an array of buttons to navigate menus. The interface could be available over a Bluetooth app, or or a self-hosted webpage, or make it show up as USB mass storage or a USB virtual serial port, or an actual RS232 or RS485 or TTL serial port, or I can grab it off a storage device with an EEPROM clip, or hook up my Tag-connect cable and a bus pirate and get I2C or SPI or whatever unnecessarily custom UART protocol you want to invent, or I can buy your dedicated HMI device with the LCD and buttons connected by a custom cable (don't want to buy yet another, I already have too many kicking around from decades of work with random industrial VFDs and PLCs and stuff), or I can hook up my MSO to some test pads and read the signals directly... But not everyone has all those tools and cables. Like it or not, the standard has become a Bluetooth app. I wish the standard was a self-hosted webpage, so I could connect my laptop to a buried RJ45 connector, set a static IP to point my NIC at the right subnet (or the device could embed a router to assign my laptop a compatible IP over DHCP, but most don't), or I could turn on an integrated wifi adapter in the device, ignore and revert the protestations of my device and OS that the connection was unsuccessful because it can't ping connectivitycheck.android.com or captive.apple.com or msftconnecttest.com or whatever through the battery pack SSID. But by the time your user manual tells the user to go to their network adapter properties and set their IP address to 10.10.0.2 (on their iPad, LOL) you've lost most people long ago. Like it or not, the standard has become Bluetooth and an app, and not without compelling if frustrating reasons.
sebstefan 1y ago
There's a lot of noise around EVs between range anxiety, recycling, catching fire etc. Is this riding on non-existent problems or is it solving an actual real problem which I've been lucky to avoid so far? I don't do e-bikes but I've had E-vespas and e-scooters and replacing a cell isn't really something I've had in mind. I've had lots of failures, none of them were from the battery. They all died too, before the battery. The next step of the lifecycle is recycling, and that's done by professionals who do have arc welders, so they don't require such convenience
- krogenx 1y ago
  [dead]
- oulipo2 1y ago
  We're going to produce larger batteries for vespas, golf carts and scooters too! Our repairable battery is actually quite convenient even for recyclers: many studies have shown that if you can get pristine cells, without all the casing / electronics / plastic parts as you're recycling the cells, you get back a much more pure recycled lithium at the end of the process!
whitehexagon 1y ago
Great idea! I try to buy devices based on 18650. It should be the new AA standard, right? But the so called 'USB' 18650 torch I got has a custom magnetic charger, yuk! The last 3 hand-held vacuum cleaners are 4x18650, but have all been welded, and non replaceable. Bike battery is already flagging, but newer replacement design has different connector. Having a universal bike battery like this sounds perfect! Even better if they make it into a generic power bank design; 48V would be perfect for connecting to solar panel for charge, then use it on the bike, lawnmower, laptop, maybe a small 230V inverter add-on. Or a smaller 8/12 bank for pushing back against power tool company 'lets change the battery standard' every 2 years so that we can sell the same tools again. Nice to see some attempt to fight this locked-down throw-away manufacturing obsession. Well done!
- crote 1y ago
  From a device manufacturer's perspective, it is mainly a safety and reliability issue. The form factor might be (mostly) standardized, but the cells themselves are not. There's a huge amount of variation between them, and using a cell improperly can quickly lead to some very nasty fires. This means user-replaceable bare cells go right out the window, and you're left having to build a custom protection circuit for the cells you want to use - which means you essentially end up with custom batteries. The solution might be a standardized way for the cell to communicate its health and capabilities to the device using it - but good luck getting the industry to adopt it. It provides no immediate benefit to the consumer while making the product more expensive, so they'll only do that when the government forces them to.
- oulipo2 1y ago
  (Gouach co-founder) Thanks for your comment! That's exactly what we're trying to do, giving back power to people by providing them stuff that they truly own, they know how it works, they can assemble and repair them (or ask their local bike-shop to do it) without any vendor lock-in!
- MayeulC 1y ago
  > Even better if they make it into a generic power bank design; 48V would be perfect for connecting to solar panel for charge, then use it on the bike, lawnmower, laptop, maybe a small 230V inverter add-on. Great idea, I would love to see them offer solar chargers as well. I was thinking of designing an open source UPS at some point, I guess I could architect it around this battery (though LiFePo would make more sense). I will have a look at the docs when they are out, I hope there's a communication/diagnosis bus, though Bluetooth would work as well.
ttoinou 1y ago
An even bigger model for vans (to get 2 kWh) would be great. But electronics for 48V is still rare and expensive. Would this be possible in 12V ? Can we also put LiFePO4 instead of Li-ion ?
- oulipo2 1y ago
  We are working on larger models already, and we plan on models for LiFePO indeed! Subscribe to our newsletter if you want to be informed :) https://gouach.com https://gouach.com
  - ttoinou 1y ago
    Merci !
oulipo2 1y ago
(Gouach co-founder here) We're happy to be on the front-page, here to reply to any of your (many) questions! We've been testing our batteries for 3+ years on an existing free-floating mobility fleet with our friends from Pony in France, they've been sustaining heat, cold, rain, snow, shocks, people throwing them in rivers, etc, and we've been able to improve them incrementally! Today we're very proud of our product: it matches the performances of the best brands, it offers connectivity, and we plan to open-source the protocol and make it hackable, so you anyone can use it on any bike! For now we've reverse-engineered and reimplemented major protocols (Bosch, Bafang, Brose, etc) Happy to take any question you might have, and if you're interested, you can order a battery here :) https://gouach.com/products/infinite-battery-complete-kit?variant=49999048573218 https://gouach.com/products/infinite-battery-complete-kit?va... (BTW: we've been trying to reach out to Louis Rossman to talk about what we do on his Right to Repair podcast, but couldn't reach him, perhaps he's here, or someone could ping him to know if he'd be interested? we love what he does and he was a source of inspiration for us!) Oh: and of course, since this is HN, I have to mention that we coded our firmware in Rust!
- MayeulC 1y ago
  Looking at your roadmap (I appreciate the transparency): https://gouach.com/pages/roadmap https://gouach.com/pages/roadmap > Implementing Geolocalisation [sic] on Batteries It should be fairly easy to integrate them into Apple's and Google's FindMy networks, as they are BLE-enabled. Maybe that's your plan? This is the kind of improvement an open source firmware would enable (though if you document the internals well enough, we could also bring our own microcontrollers or custom firmware). Anyway, I am itching to buy one, but I do not own an e-bike yet (just a few old "La Poste" batteries I would like to salvage the cells of). I will be in the market of an e-bike next year, and would love it if your battery was an option offered by bike shops with new bike purchases.
- orwin 1y ago
  'Oulipo' nice username, you have a background in litterature?
- evelant 1y ago
  Have you considered expanding this idea to more than just ebikes? For example at least here in the US lithium ion tool batteries come with lots of different connector shapes just to lock users into a brand and are not repairable. Manufacturers charge a lot for the batteries, often more than the tools, and if (when) they go bad they just have to be thrown out. Manufacturers even occasionally "upgrade" their battery designs so that they're not backwards compatible to force purchase of new batteries for newer tools. A universal repairable tool battery would likely be a big hit! Another use case might be USB power packs. These are all sealed and not repairable. They go bad after awhile and the whole thing is waste when it's most likely just a single cell failing.
frozencell 1y ago
Can I put that into a humanoid

195 points by pabs3 1y ago

I wonder how much they will have to protect against recklessness of the e-bike owners? For example, against the end user sourcing substandard cells, and combining them in inadvisable ways. I don't have a good profile of e-bike owner behavior about maintaining their own equipment, but what I can say is fewer than 1/5 of e-bikes will stop on red at a 3-way intersection near me (when cars are stopped in the parallel lane, and pedestrians are crossing). We also see a lot of riding on sidewalks, at speed, to bypass red lights and traffic on a major street here. That said, the e-bike riders are often wearing helmets as they plow through pedestrians, so maybe their recklessness only extends to the safety of others, and they'll be conscientious about not lighting a lithium battery fire between their own legs.

serf 1y ago

it's a cool idea for small setups, but very expensive per kwh. if you want the same kind of style diy-er box-for-batteries I suggest the Trampa offerings. Similar focus on safety and novice level DIYer capability but much larger capacities and arrangements.

oulipo2 1y ago
Very nice battery boxes! Our product is expected to go down in price as we increase the production. Our product also comes with a high-end connected Battery Management System (the "brain" of the battery), and with a sturdy and fire-resistant aluminum casing!

jfim 1y ago

I wonder if this will allow flying with an ebike battery in disassembled form. The regulations allow up to 100Wh per battery, and an unlimited number of batteries, so transporting the individual cells should be okay, at least in theory.

Analemma_ 1y ago
Lugging an entire suitcase full of 1 kWh worth of batteries might not technically be against regulations, but I imagine you'd be signing yourself up for a long series of headaches at the security checkpoint anyway. To be honest, if I knew that security wouldn't stop me because "it's not technically against regulations", that's exactly what I would do if I wanted to bring down a plane.
- jfim 1y ago
  Right, that's basically the problem, if one wants to travel by air with an ebike without hassle, there's no real option to do so. There's the Ligo 10X (https://ebikes.ca/product-info/grin-products/ligo10x-battery.html https://ebikes.ca/product-info/grin-products/ligo10x-battery...) which makes 99Wh battery packs that can be connected together, but otherwise it just seems like rules lawyering. There really needs to be standardization of battery packs for ebikes instead of proprietary ones, so that one could rent a battery at their destination.
  - kevincox 1y ago
    At that point why not just rent the whole bike and not need to bring the large object onto the plane?
    - pmg101 1y ago
      Because ones bike is a carefully selected item perfectly fitted to ones body shape and preferences, whereas the battery is simply a line replaceable unit.
      - lm28469 1y ago
        That's such an edge case though.... what about my fine tuned piano? Or my aquarium? At some point personal luxuries don't have to be accommodated for
        1y ago

consp 1y ago

Balancing will be a nightmare I guess, or just dont do it. Nice idea for the advanced user but I would not let my parents fiddle around with lose 18650 cells for the sake of their house burning down. I see a niche application but personally hope they get it to market and make it compatible with Shimano. My double sized battery is a frankenbattery: pcb from original with custom printed case fitting onto the original attachment device using the batteries from two original batteries. Measured and balanced of course. Safety is "meh" I guess because DIY. I'd like to replace it with something more properly designed.

pinkmuffinere 1y ago
I did my masters thesis on how to balance batteries with very little information on each individual battery a-priori! Unfortunately I didn’t get to do experimental stuff because it was the middle of Covid, I only had simulation data. You can do some interesting things, though I wonder how many issues we missed/avoided by working only in simulation. Edit: here’s the publication if you’re curious: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405896320323879 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240589632... Edit-edit: wow I got two citations!!! Never thought anyone would read my paper, that’s amazing.

abdullahkhalids 1y ago

An ebike is very weight sensitive. How much extra weight does this innovation lead to? I would rather have the whole battery be replacable. And when you want to replace, you trade-in your old one for a discount on the new one.

swader999 1y ago
Very little I'd bet and location of the weight is far more critical to overall utility. Hopefully this is well thought out.
amluto 1y ago
> An ebike is very weight sensitive. E-bikes tend to be quite heavy, and many of them have designs that are very much not optimized for weight. > I would rather have the whole battery be replacable. They are. And the replacements are single-source and are very expensive.
- gonzo41 1y ago
  To a degree yes, however I have an ebike and the bosch battery with a it has a 500W battery which is about equiv (if my math is right) to a 28 Ah ryobi drill battery. Those don't exist btw, but if i wanted one and bought 7 4Ah batteries to get the same effect they would cost more than the single ebike battery. As a single item they are pretty well priced for the power they offer.
  - andreareina 1y ago
    I think those batteries have their own BMSs, plus casing etc, that adds to the cost. The story as I can understand it is about being able to swap out individual cells which won't have those overheads.
Johnny555 1y ago
Pedal powered bikes are very weight sensitive. The average e-bike (at least one that would use a fat battery pack like the on pictured in the article), are less weight sensitive. The RadKick 7 (which RadPower calls a "lightweight bike" weighs 55 lbs. Racing bikes like the $10K Trek Domaine Carbon weighs less than 30 lbs, but has a much slimmer (and lower capacity) battery pack than what Gouach seems to be targeting.

ortusdux 1y ago

I like the idea of Batteries as a Service, and I could see it working in some US cities for scooters. https://www.gogoro.com/ https://www.gogoro.com/ Many consumers just don't want to worry about battery health. Reportedly, battery degradation anxiety is driving down used EV prices in the US.

contrarian1234 1y ago
Gogoro is a borderline scam. There are not multiple battery providers. You can only get batteries through gogoro and they dictate the price (it govt fixed for X amount of year and then who knows what happensl. Till recently you couldn't charge the scooter/batteries at home (even now it's made impractical) You in effect are renting your vehicle It's only successful in Taiwan due to slick marketing and intense nationalism
edg5000 1y ago
In China they have car battery swap stations. For such batteries, owenership does not make much sense, so a subscription model indeed seems logical. The monthly fee covers the cost it takes for the company to replace worn cells; electricity could be charged separately for cars. For scooters, since the batteries are easy to swap yourself, buying and swapping a new battery is not that big of a deal, so I don't see subscriptions working as well there as for cars.
- oulipo2 1y ago
  (Gouach co-founder) Yes! Our battery would be perfect for a swap business, they could easily fix damaged batteries, repair cells (only $50, instead of buying a new battery at $300 retailer price), and at the end, they could even retrieve used cells to sell them back for energy storage applications!
oulipo2 1y ago
(Gouach co-founder here) A lot of people would prefer to not have to care, but many of them do care because they know it's the major "consumable" part of their $3000+ e-bike investment, and they want to know if it will last long, if it's robust, and if it can be repaired in case it's needed Additionally, we've seen more and more customers wary of the environmental and social cost (children mines, etc) linked to lithium batteries, and who are looking for more durable solutions

swader999 1y ago

This is a great idea. Would be wild if they could support switching on the fly between 32 and 48v for a range/speed option. That gets complicated though.

jacquesm 1y ago
Most e-bike providers will buy their switching logic based on the voltage in use, a driver for 48V would be substantially more expensive than one for 32V. There is also the whole charger setup to consider so yes, that gets complicated.
fennecbutt 1y ago
Doesn't need to. Power is power.
- aetherspawn 1y ago
  This guy is right, the premise of switching doesn’t make sense, power is power.
  - swader999 1y ago
    I only remember when I built my own batteries, I would get more range at lower volts because at about 40+km/hr you end up pushing wind and range goes way down. So yeah, technically power is power, but it's fun to go 50km/hr if you don't have far to go.
    - numpad0 1y ago
      There probably aren't many EVs that can't regulate voltage across motor poles between 0 to +battery pack(or -1/2 to +1/2 pack) voltage...
    - andreareina 1y ago
      Did your controller only have one power setting?

Liftyee 1y ago

Let's hope the inane DMCA laws don't get them for decrypting the Bosch battery-motor communication. If HN had profile pictures, mine would be a Clippy.

Animats 1y ago

Is this a problem due to bad cell quality control? Car-sized lithium batteries are lasting 200,000+ miles. Why aren't e-bike batteries?

lallysingh 1y ago
How many cycles does the ebike battery go through in 200k+ miles? An EV car does ~300 miles/cycle. So 200k miles = 667 cycles.
- gonzo41 1y ago
  i get about 90km of range from a 500Wt Bosch battery. Thats running at full power the whole time.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    That is amazing performance. I usually get about half that.
    - gonzo41 1y ago
      I usually ride faster than the motors limit, so it's really just acting like a push, and most of the battery is spent dragging me up a really big hill i live on. Everywhere I ride down in town is pretty much flat.
  - ul5255 1y ago
    With 600Wh battery and Shimano Steps E5000 in lowest support level I can easily ride 250km/charge
- jve 1y ago
  Cycles is not the only variable in play here: - Depth of Discharge - how often you go from full to low battery? Going twice from 80->30 (which accounts to a single cycle) is much better than single 100->0 cycle - Thermal management - what are cell temperatures when battery is being charged? Maybe it is charged in direct sunlight? This will kill battery pretty fast. At what temperatures are the cells when driving the ebike? - Ebike/scooter probably being charged to 100% more often than necessary. - Did you leave your battery at winter completely discharged or fully charged in your garage? Bad. TLDR: Info I gathered about reading how to take care of Lithium NMC batteries which are so widespread.

jmclnx 1y ago

I think it is a pretty god idea. It may remove quite a bit of battery waste.

awongh 1y ago

It would be cool to see a fully open source ebike. Sort of like a framework (the hardware company) of ebikes.

deleted 1y ago
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andreareina 1y ago
What would you like to see beyond what you can already do, i.e. buy a bike (or frameset, wheelset, groupset) and conversion kit?
- throwaway34564 1y ago
  I think the proposition is an open-source "conversion kit". Battery, charge controller, motor controller, sensors, display, source-code, specifications, etc. Built with some sort of standard so parts are easy to swap/extend. I like the idea
- awongh 1y ago
  Like it's mentioned in the article the motor controllers themselves are closed source so they have to hack the protocol in order to plug the battery into it. What if all the software and hardware systems of the bike were open source, not just the battery.
oulipo2 1y ago
We're only working on the battery, but we plan to open-source at least the app and make the communication protocol extensible with "plugins", in order to let users configure their batteries for any controller protocol!

aetherspawn 1y ago

This is such a terrible idea because the packs have to be factory balanced before assembly, and everyday Joe doesn’t have the equipment (or probably the understanding) to do this part properly. If the packs are not perfectly balanced, the batteries just short into each other and explode, and BMS can’t do anything because there isn’t any per-cell switch (cost). It’s not just a matter of balancing voltage either, the cell profiles (voltage vs SOC) have to be the same otherwise you end up with 1 cell doing all the work. Simply put, when you mix and match cells of different brands, models, or even ages, they don’t integrate evenly. This results in a few or even just 1 cell doing a majority of the work during both charge and discharge, maybe 10x higher than its safety rating, guaranteed fire… Also end-user is expected to do the math and input the battery’s total current rating into the motor controller? Yeah, nah, a hundred kids will think it’s cool to set this too high and set themselves and people around them on fire.

trenchpilgrim 1y ago
The Toyota Prius community already has a better solution for this - You can buy remanufactured batteries, then send your used battery back to get a credit. ChrisFix on YouTube has a swap guide for DIYers - it's mostly taking all the interior panels out of the back of the car.
- oulipo 1y ago
  (Gouach co-founder here) This is nice, but when you have an e-bike with a malfunctioning battery that you use for work everyday, you don't want to have the 2/3 months it generally takes for exchange programs. Plus, once you sent your battery, they either discard it which is not ideal for the environment, or try to remanufacture it, which is very dangerous when it's done on a battery which wasn't designed for it, like ours
beefnugs 1y ago
Sounds like a challenge: start monitoring individual temperatures, long term recording of performance down to the cell, recommend a mAh value of cell in a particular location, dynamic ohm chips in series with batteries to control differential discharging. I am not enough of an expert to know if all this could work, but its got to be better than replacing an entire pack at a time to be worth trying

elahieh 1y ago

A cryptography angle in the article. Would this be illegal in the US under DMCA? One of the biggest compatibility challenges, Vallette said, was finding a way to work with Bosch's mid-drive motors. The communications between a Bosch motor and battery are encrypted; after "a serious effort," Gouach's app and battery should work with them, Vallette said.

jMyles 1y ago
...uhh, yeah, certainly seems like a buried lede. What precisely can I do with Gouach's app and a Bosch mid-drive?
- oulipo 1y ago
  We managed to reverse-engineer the protocol and to make our battery communicate with the Bosch controllers!
  - clumsysmurf 1y ago
    What happens when Bosch changes the protocol / encryption just for the heck of it, are you guys back to square one?
    - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
      > What happens when Bosch changes the protocol / encryption just for the heck of it Bosch old batteries don’t work with their own new controller anymore. Not saying it will never happen but Bosch can’t do that every week either.
      - wongarsu 1y ago
        And there'd still be all the already sold controllers, including brand new bikes at retailers. These things don't exactly have over-the-air updates, they are designed to just work forever with the firmware they ship with

vallettea 1y ago

alex vallette here (cofounder and ceo): shipping in the usa will resume in september. we had to suspend because of tarifs but now we have a warehouse on the east coast so things should be much more optimized as the tariffs will apply only on cost of goods ans not on the consumer price. subscribe to the newsletter to stay tune (we only send one mail every two weeks)

torginus 1y ago
Hi! Thanks for coming here. I have a question - how does the device aid in identifying in which cells have gone bad, and then do the necessary rebalancing to match the load level of the cells in the string? Also, cell replacement is a concern in EVs that placing in a cell of different make and age to the existing ones will mean that cell will have a different charge curve to the others, making very easy for the pack to go 'out of sync' again. How do you address this issue? You also mentioned that you spent a huge amount of time on making sure the contacts stay in place during the shaking that comes with riding a bike - which is super important as jumpy contacts could cause DC arcing which is a fire hazard. How would you ease the concern that such a thing absolutely cannot happen?
- oulipo2 1y ago
  (Gouach cofounder) There's an app which shows you the voltage level of each cell, and the battery will auto-rebalance them! For second-life cells, you indeed have to match the cells, we don't necessarily expect people to do that themselves, but we will partner with battery recyclers to get second-life cells, test and match them, and sell back those packs at a lower price as an additional revenue stream for the recycling industry! Our battery would be perfect for this kind of use-case For the shaking of contacts, rest assured that: our batteries get tested by third-party authorities like any other batteries, and go through intense stress-test (check https://www.instagram.com/p/C-c_NEbtE4N/ https://www.instagram.com/p/C-c_NEbtE4N/ for an example) And as a second proof, our batteries have been in use in a free-floating mobility startup, Pony, for around 3+ years, they have been subjected to all kind of heat, cold, rain, snow, people kicking bikes, people throwing bikes in the river, etc, and they are working great!

lentil_soup 1y ago

>> It keeps you updated on the status of cell performance and heat through a Bluetooth-connected app why an app? Why not a simple light or error code on device?

WinstonSmith84 1y ago
1- might make the (waterproof) case harder to build 2- finding the right dead battery among 18650 batteries is requiring more hints than just "something is wrong" 3- marketing / convenience and probably you can order your dead battery straight from the app 4- monitoring battery charge, battery life / cycles / etc. 5- no idea :-) Just speculating, but I guess there are a lot of reasons why a bluetooth app makes sense
- juliangmp 1y ago
  I think the idea might be that you don't need to check the battery health yourself but instead you get pinged when a cell's getting close to dead
- thmsths 1y ago
  Your second point made me chuckle ;)
deleted 1y ago
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nandomrumber 1y ago
Bluetooth connect apps are pretty much commodified at this point. If one product has an app, and the next one doesn’t, people will choose the one that does.
LeifCarrotson 1y ago
Why not both? I'd love an error LED to tell me something's wrong, maybe (maybe) with complicated blink codes that I can count and recount to determine which cell is bad or what action to take, but I also want a Bluetooth app to access the actual data: live cell voltages, currents and temperatures, estimated storage capacity and cell health, lifetime charge cycles and total power delivery... Give me all the data! I don't want to increase the cost and complexity, and reduce the runtime of the thing with an onboard tiny LCD and an array of buttons to navigate menus. The interface could be available over a Bluetooth app, or or a self-hosted webpage, or make it show up as USB mass storage or a USB virtual serial port, or an actual RS232 or RS485 or TTL serial port, or I can grab it off a storage device with an EEPROM clip, or hook up my Tag-connect cable and a bus pirate and get I2C or SPI or whatever unnecessarily custom UART protocol you want to invent, or I can buy your dedicated HMI device with the LCD and buttons connected by a custom cable (don't want to buy yet another, I already have too many kicking around from decades of work with random industrial VFDs and PLCs and stuff), or I can hook up my MSO to some test pads and read the signals directly... But not everyone has all those tools and cables. Like it or not, the standard has become a Bluetooth app. I wish the standard was a self-hosted webpage, so I could connect my laptop to a buried RJ45 connector, set a static IP to point my NIC at the right subnet (or the device could embed a router to assign my laptop a compatible IP over DHCP, but most don't), or I could turn on an integrated wifi adapter in the device, ignore and revert the protestations of my device and OS that the connection was unsuccessful because it can't ping connectivitycheck.android.com or captive.apple.com or msftconnecttest.com or whatever through the battery pack SSID. But by the time your user manual tells the user to go to their network adapter properties and set their IP address to 10.10.0.2 (on their iPad, LOL) you've lost most people long ago. Like it or not, the standard has become Bluetooth and an app, and not without compelling if frustrating reasons.

sebstefan 1y ago

There's a lot of noise around EVs between range anxiety, recycling, catching fire etc. Is this riding on non-existent problems or is it solving an actual real problem which I've been lucky to avoid so far? I don't do e-bikes but I've had E-vespas and e-scooters and replacing a cell isn't really something I've had in mind. I've had lots of failures, none of them were from the battery. They all died too, before the battery. The next step of the lifecycle is recycling, and that's done by professionals who do have arc welders, so they don't require such convenience

krogenx 1y ago
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oulipo2 1y ago
We're going to produce larger batteries for vespas, golf carts and scooters too! Our repairable battery is actually quite convenient even for recyclers: many studies have shown that if you can get pristine cells, without all the casing / electronics / plastic parts as you're recycling the cells, you get back a much more pure recycled lithium at the end of the process!

whitehexagon 1y ago

Great idea! I try to buy devices based on 18650. It should be the new AA standard, right? But the so called 'USB' 18650 torch I got has a custom magnetic charger, yuk! The last 3 hand-held vacuum cleaners are 4x18650, but have all been welded, and non replaceable. Bike battery is already flagging, but newer replacement design has different connector. Having a universal bike battery like this sounds perfect! Even better if they make it into a generic power bank design; 48V would be perfect for connecting to solar panel for charge, then use it on the bike, lawnmower, laptop, maybe a small 230V inverter add-on. Or a smaller 8/12 bank for pushing back against power tool company 'lets change the battery standard' every 2 years so that we can sell the same tools again. Nice to see some attempt to fight this locked-down throw-away manufacturing obsession. Well done!

crote 1y ago
From a device manufacturer's perspective, it is mainly a safety and reliability issue. The form factor might be (mostly) standardized, but the cells themselves are not. There's a huge amount of variation between them, and using a cell improperly can quickly lead to some very nasty fires. This means user-replaceable bare cells go right out the window, and you're left having to build a custom protection circuit for the cells you want to use - which means you essentially end up with custom batteries. The solution might be a standardized way for the cell to communicate its health and capabilities to the device using it - but good luck getting the industry to adopt it. It provides no immediate benefit to the consumer while making the product more expensive, so they'll only do that when the government forces them to.
oulipo2 1y ago
(Gouach co-founder) Thanks for your comment! That's exactly what we're trying to do, giving back power to people by providing them stuff that they truly own, they know how it works, they can assemble and repair them (or ask their local bike-shop to do it) without any vendor lock-in!
MayeulC 1y ago
> Even better if they make it into a generic power bank design; 48V would be perfect for connecting to solar panel for charge, then use it on the bike, lawnmower, laptop, maybe a small 230V inverter add-on. Great idea, I would love to see them offer solar chargers as well. I was thinking of designing an open source UPS at some point, I guess I could architect it around this battery (though LiFePo would make more sense). I will have a look at the docs when they are out, I hope there's a communication/diagnosis bus, though Bluetooth would work as well.

ttoinou 1y ago

An even bigger model for vans (to get 2 kWh) would be great. But electronics for 48V is still rare and expensive. Would this be possible in 12V ? Can we also put LiFePO4 instead of Li-ion ?

oulipo2 1y ago
We are working on larger models already, and we plan on models for LiFePO indeed! Subscribe to our newsletter if you want to be informed :) https://gouach.com https://gouach.com
- ttoinou 1y ago
  Merci !

oulipo2 1y ago

(Gouach co-founder here) We're happy to be on the front-page, here to reply to any of your (many) questions! We've been testing our batteries for 3+ years on an existing free-floating mobility fleet with our friends from Pony in France, they've been sustaining heat, cold, rain, snow, shocks, people throwing them in rivers, etc, and we've been able to improve them incrementally! Today we're very proud of our product: it matches the performances of the best brands, it offers connectivity, and we plan to open-source the protocol and make it hackable, so you anyone can use it on any bike! For now we've reverse-engineered and reimplemented major protocols (Bosch, Bafang, Brose, etc) Happy to take any question you might have, and if you're interested, you can order a battery here :) https://gouach.com/products/infinite-battery-complete-kit?variant=49999048573218 https://gouach.com/products/infinite-battery-complete-kit?va... (BTW: we've been trying to reach out to Louis Rossman to talk about what we do on his Right to Repair podcast, but couldn't reach him, perhaps he's here, or someone could ping him to know if he'd be interested? we love what he does and he was a source of inspiration for us!) Oh: and of course, since this is HN, I have to mention that we coded our firmware in Rust!

MayeulC 1y ago
Looking at your roadmap (I appreciate the transparency): https://gouach.com/pages/roadmap https://gouach.com/pages/roadmap > Implementing Geolocalisation [sic] on Batteries It should be fairly easy to integrate them into Apple's and Google's FindMy networks, as they are BLE-enabled. Maybe that's your plan? This is the kind of improvement an open source firmware would enable (though if you document the internals well enough, we could also bring our own microcontrollers or custom firmware). Anyway, I am itching to buy one, but I do not own an e-bike yet (just a few old "La Poste" batteries I would like to salvage the cells of). I will be in the market of an e-bike next year, and would love it if your battery was an option offered by bike shops with new bike purchases.
orwin 1y ago
'Oulipo' nice username, you have a background in litterature?
evelant 1y ago
Have you considered expanding this idea to more than just ebikes? For example at least here in the US lithium ion tool batteries come with lots of different connector shapes just to lock users into a brand and are not repairable. Manufacturers charge a lot for the batteries, often more than the tools, and if (when) they go bad they just have to be thrown out. Manufacturers even occasionally "upgrade" their battery designs so that they're not backwards compatible to force purchase of new batteries for newer tools. A universal repairable tool battery would likely be a big hit! Another use case might be USB power packs. These are all sealed and not repairable. They go bad after awhile and the whole thing is waste when it's most likely just a single cell failing.

frozencell 1y ago

Can I put that into a humanoid