Table of contents

  1. Greetings from both terminals!
  2. Introduction
  3. Why we started this?
  4. What we offer?
  5. Project outputs
  6. Let’s start! 💪
Greetings from both terminals! Greetings from both terminals!

Greetings from both terminals!

3/12/2026 / 3 minutes to read / Tags: introduction, why we do this, OpenBMS

Introduction

Like, a battery has two terminals, so greetings from both of them? Right? Nevermind :)

This is the first blog post on the OpenBatt website. We will be using this space to share updates, news, and insights about our battery system projects. Our projects are related to electronics and firmware designs for rechargeable batteries.

Why we started this?

Our world is using more and more batteries. Almost every piece of technology has some sort of battery in it. And, as some of you already know, just because we’re surrounded by them, batteries are not simple it seems. They are like kids — they need care, attention, and a good management system to keep them healthy and happy. These systems are called Battery Management Systems (BMS) and their job is to take care of battery charging, discharging, temperature, health, etc. What happens if you don’t do that? You might kill the battery too soon, which is still okay, or overheat it, which is much worse (you probably saw videos of phones and cars catching fire).

“So, I’ll just buy the battery and a BMS — there are certainly good ones out there.” We thought the same! We started and quickly figured out the market doesn’t offer good off-the-shelf solutions. There are:

  • cheap solutions — universal solutions, partial functionalities, no support, not adjusted to a particular battery
  • complex solutions — fully customized solutions, adjusted for your battery, but expensive in terms of money, time, and knowledge. You need to be either an expert in the field or pay an external service to do it for you.

What we offer?

We went through both cheap and complex solutions. We gathered enough knowledge (at least we think so) to start our own BMS project — OpenBMS — an open source battery management system (BMS) for Li-Ion and Li-Po batteries. It’s going to have:

  • Fuel gauge — to measure the battery capacity, state of charge, state of health
  • Learning algorithms — to learn the battery behavior and adjust the management accordingly
  • Cell balancing — for multi-cell batteries, cell voltage balancing is crucial as cells can drift away from each other over time
  • Protection — to protect the battery from overcharging, overdischarging, overheating, short circuit, etc.
  • Communication — to communicate with the battery and other devices, such as chargers, displays, microcontrollers, etc.

Project outputs

  • Schematics — hardware design files in KiCAD format
  • PCB layouts — hardware design files in KiCAD format
  • Firmware — source code for the microcontroller in C
  • Algorithms — source code for the learning algorithms
  • Python desktop application — to monitor and configure the BMS
  • Documentation — we will do our best to document everything

Let’s start! 💪

Everything here is open source, so feel free to explore, contribute, and share your thoughts. We are excited to have you on this journey with us!

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