It’s been a fantastic day of watching the viewer numbers climb on the video that Ryan released on his Ziroth channel. The amount of engagement been incredible too – this is clearly an area lots of people feel really strongly about.
I wanted to keep a bit of a response going for the various comments. It’s useful to see the themes that emerge and make sure that I’ve done my best to explain why things have been done in a particular way.
In my experience of being a company founder and inventor, I’ve also learnt not to take individual comments too seriously. If any of the commentors get to the point of creating their own products and get them to market at scale, then I’d be really pleased to work together.
I’ve had some lovely emails from people looking to buy BMS units, and several requests to invest in BatteryIQ. I’ll get back to all the emails very shortly.
Thank you once again for the interest.
Nick Bailey, Founder & CEO, BatteryIQ
Question: Can I buy a BatteryIQ BMS for my home project?
The short answer is ‘not right now, but probably soon’. Part of the BatteryIQ concept is that BMS units are linked to a battery in a trusted & audited factory, so that we as BatteryIQ can say with high confidence that a battery has been built to a high standard and hasn’t been modified. Each BatteryIQ BMS already has several unique serial numbers that must match eachother. If the BMS is cloned and the same numbers appear twice on the network in different locations or with mismatched uptimes, both batteries will be considered unsafe.
Going forward, this supply chain traceability will mean we can say to insurers and building owners “don’t worry, BatteryIQ is in this battery, we have quality controlled its manufacture, and we can show you that it’s operating normally.”
Therefore the gold standard for BatteryIQ, and required to display our safety logo and be considered safe via the app, website and API, requires batteries to be built by professional companies who have been through an audit process.
But, there’s actually nothing to stop us supplying BMS units on the proviso that the amateur-made battery will not and cannot ever be considered ‘audited and safe’, but users can still locally scan the BMS via their phone to see what’s going on. The BatteryIQ network would discard data from that BMS and it would not be available in a different location. Part of the concept is that you can see all your batteries are safe via the cloud without having to actually be there – but that functionality would only be available to commercial partners making repeatable batteries through a quality process.
So I think my mind has been changed on this, and we will (try to) find a way to offer the BMS to the amateur market. I’m a regular customer of ThePiHut and use various Arduino & Waveshare devices and I would love these amateur and home engineers to use BatteryIQ and helping create a community around it, rather than buy from Daly or other opaque devices. I’m 50% a home engineer myself – I have lots of projects on the go and various bits of test gear that will never get to volume production.
BatteryIQ is incidentally not ESP32 based, as that would be from a geography we can’t use for EU space projects.
Question: Is this possible to integrate with Home Assistant?
I’ve recently taken an interest in Home Assistant as my house is powered by a reclaimed and rebuild Nissan Leaf battery, so I want sensors & actuators across the BatteryIQ BMS on my DIY ESS as well as on hot water tank, solar and interverter.
I think it is possible for us to create a Home Assistant profile that would scan for local BatteryIQ batteries and then your data would be available in HA much like any other device. Totally up to you whether you use HA Cloud (where your BIQ data would be hosted by HA, not us.)
Question: Can I invest?
Thanks for the emails about investment. We are considering SEIS investments based on interest but aren’t considering any crowd-style (sub £5,000) investments.
Following previous seed investment we aren’t in urgent need of more funding, but if you are interested in SEIS investment please do drop us a line – it could help to support pilots we have coming up in New York, plus the European Space Agency & Open Cosmos projects.
We are aiming for a VC/pre-VC investment round in late 2026 depending on milestones with pilots and launches with a number of manufacturers, at a higher valuation.
Question: Who is this BMS for?
The goal of this BMS and the wider BatteryIQ project is to be able to distinguish between safe batteries and unsafe batteries, for millions of people who just want their battery to work and be safe.
The reputation of e-bikes has been significantly tarnished by fires, that are all caused by damage, modification or amateur battery assembly, often in the gig economy where low cost is the priority.
The cloud version of the BatteryIQ ecosystem is not designed for home builders, because it’s not possible to assure that one-off amateur packs have been made properly. However, due to the interest in the technology, we are going to try to find ways to provide versions of the BMS that can be used for amateur builds that can be scanned by local phone without anything being sent to the internet. But, these packs will always show as ‘not verified’ on the BatteryIQ app and there will not be a way to get approval for single-build packs.
By requiring an in-depth audit for manufacturers to be permitted to add batteries to the cloud system, we can provide confidence to building insurers, owners and home owners (and their families) that BatteryIQ approved batteries are safe. In our view, amateur made battery packs should not be allowed into buildings or on trains. Lithium batteries are simply too dangerous and cause too much harm.
Companies like Daly have no shortage of BMSes for home builds – but due to the lack of enforcement of setpoints and any kind of safety standards, these BMSes will never be sufficient to give an confidence to authorities or insurers that a battery is safe. Home makers can build their own packs but they have very little value if they can’t be stored in insured premises or used for commuting to offices. EU defence and aerospace companies do not consider these devices safe as the internal code is impossible to verify; it’s likely that spyware or monitoring code is embedded.
This is maybe the antithesis of the ‘maker’ philosophy – but this isn’t a maker product. It gives governments globally a tool to get more people using e-bikes, which in our view is the bigger prize.
Comment: I don’t want anything cloud so this is a no-no for me
Fair enough. Despite us all using cloud connected devices and every website being able to track your location via GeoIP every time you visit it, some people are nervous about data going online.
The point of having a radio backhaul from the BMS is that data can come off it and be returned to the battery owner, and different cuts of data (anonimised and masked) to other parties such as the battery manufacturer or building owner of where the battery is located.
The revenue model to pay for the cloud system is yet to be finalised. The commitment we’ve made to manufacturers is that the BMS will always work without a cloud connection, and continue to work if we as a company disappear. The BMS will always allow local connection from a phone app. Our general model is to charge $1-2 per BMS from each one we supply globally, for millions or billions of batteries. A punitive cloud system that can cut-off the battery you already own makes no commercial sense.
Where manufacturers need data from our cloud system, or users want the ability to see their battery data remotely, someone will have to pay for this. For users, we could simply wrap this into the price of the wall scanners that provide the remote-view capability.
Cloud has some other benefits for personal users; such as the ability to lock and turn off the battery remotely to secure it from other family members using it, or for security.
We are also now going to provide a setting for even production batteries where a battery is ‘offline-only’. The battery will still transmit but even if data reaches the BIQ Cloud, it will be discarded before being processed. We can’t stop batteries transmitting as that would create a vector for attacks. Offline-only batteries would remain scannable by local phones.
Comment: Cloud means BatteryIQ can switch off my battery remotely
The current firmware on the BMS can’t do this. Without going into the details, the current firmware has no means to modify the BMS remotely – the data goes in one direction from BMS to phone or scanner.
It makes no sense for BatteryIQ to forcibly switch off a battery that’s fully owned.
The only models that could involve remote disconnection (with future versions of the firmware, currently unwritten) would be for battery hire scenarios where a battery is locked by the owner of the battery for some reason – maybe lack of payment of rent etc. This isn’t really a BatteryIQ problem though – that’s a business model that we can facilitate for companies that wish to lease batteries.
Comment: This makes my battery vulnerable to hackers
Without going into the details, the current firmware has no means to modify the BMS remotely – the data goes in one direction from BMS to phone or scanner. Bluetooth and the software stack around it is generally open source and well understood and vulnerabilities when they have occurred have been patched.
As a general rule, BatteryIQ is very restrictive of the owners ability to fiddle with the battery setpoints. While Daly and the like allow users to set the charge & discharge voltage limits as they wish, BatteryIQ does not allow these to be changed, at all. Yes it’s a bit nanny-state, but our priority is to protect less technically competent battery users by the millions and this priority overrides the desire of hobbyist users to have complete control.
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