I haven’t reviewed a battery tester in a while! This week, I’m covering the Very Fancy ZKE EBD-M05. This is a 19.5V, 5A, 30W battery tester with a rather slick computer interface, and some properly impressive accuracy (once calibrated). Plus, it measures watt-hours!
(Comments from Blogger)
2019-01-22 by Marcos Cano
I have both, this EBD-M05 and a TEC-06. The EBD came fairly miscalibrated so I calibrated it against some Promax equipment. After numerous test, the EBD-M05 always measures far less capacity than the TEC-06, no matter if the TEC is running in mode 1 or 2. For the moment I will stick with the TEC, but let’s see if the thing improves over time with firmware updates (V3.15 as of today).
2019-01-28 by Unknown
Does it mean that you find TEC more reliable despite manual calibration of EBD-M05?
2019-01-31 by DrB
Unfortunately the TEC-06 does not measure Wh, but it’s more accurate. My EBD-M05 was not precise enough when measuring lower currents (it’s 10% to low @100mA). I’ll try the calibration now.
2019-01-31 by DrB
Just performed the calibration, made some tests, the measurement accuracy is very good now.
2019-01-31 by Russell Graves
Excellent, glad to hear! I’ve yet to have many complaints with a device after calibration, assuming it actually has that feature.
2019-03-23 by HenrysCat
Hi, excellent review and have now received mine, now a question on calibration, if I was to use a hand held multimeter what connections would I make and where to calibrate current? (I have the ZKE 4 wire battery rack)
2019-03-24 by HenrysCat
I have tested a Sofirn 26650 cell and can’t get it to pass any more than about 2.5A, even with the software set at 4A ?
Any ideas?
2019-06-03 by smartbsv
Hello. Nice article! I have TEC-12P and also USB adapter from board to PC (pl2303). I’ve tried to make a friendship between ZKE software and TEC tester. But it fault, ZKE program starts, but not connects to tester (by the way, it is right COM3 port of USB-adapter). TEC software works fine with this cable. But TEC software haven’t so much options, like ZKE soft have.
2020-08-09 by Llama Spit
"…some percent error at the very bottom end (if you’re off by 0.001V at 0.10V, that’s still 10% error)…"
WELL, ERRRR, NOPE… that’s only ONE PERCENT error!
2020-08-13 by Russell Graves
You caught me screwing up orders of magnitude! 
2020-11-20 by R. Page
For anyone who comes across this posts and hopes to find out the communication protocol. I have been sniffing the serial port and was getting very close to figuring it out. Then I came across this github, ZKE Tech EBD+ protocol in QB64 · GitHub. The only issue I have found with the code is that the current seems to be off by a factor of 10. I need to confirm, but it seems that it should be divide by 1000 and not 10000 for the EBD-M05.