CAPACITOR POWAH!

[Enki]

I think the video pretty much says it all. Language slightly NSFW.

Charging configuration:
To start, I used a regular car battery charger connected directly to the cap bank, which all together, had .3 volts at the time. It turns out this was a very bad idea (as I figured it would be) since an empty capacitor will move as much current as a shorted circuit, and the battery charger scared the shit out of my dad (he actually left the shed) because it was humming like a city substation despite being set to 2 amp trickle charge.

Trying to remove the connection with the charger still running was also a bad idea, and resulted in this:



So, I gave everything a few minutes to cool down and then I redid the charging circuit by including a charging ballast (in this case, one of the original headlights from the Falcon that this test is for). It took several hours to trickle charge up to ~8 volts, which is when I set the charger to run on a 15-40 cycle until 10 volts, which is when the ballast was removed. It charged pretty rapidly after that, and at about 12.5 volts is when it was moved out to the test vehicle. Also, every 2 volts of charge I disconnected everything and manually checked the balance on each cell; nothing was out of the ordinary, and final 14v charge (fresh off the test vehicle) saw a variance of only ~.1 volts per cap maximum; two caps held a charge of 2.39, and one had a charge of 2.3 while the rest had a charge of around 2.33-2.36. Considering cell max is 2.7, maybe 2.8 volts, this is well within spec and is unlikely to implicitly require a balancing circuit, even though I will be running one in the final product.

Incidentally, the caps never got warmer than ambient during any part of testing, though the terminal straps did pick up about 5 degrees or so, probably due to shitty connection which I'll fix later.