Arduino Battery Monitoring.

[timmyjane]

Anyone see this blog? HERE Looks like a reasonably worthwhile project if someone wanted to monitor individual batteries. I think that Im going to make an order for the boards. Min of 3 to an order. Anyone else interested? Probably have 2 extra boards.

[Volt_Ampere]

Can you post a link? I have been doing the same thing myself.

[Volt_Ampere]

Sorry did not see the HERE at first. I have not looked at his circuit but I have spent a couple months working on mine for monitoring the 14 lithium cells. It is not simple to sample all 14 cells of a lithium pack and have the voltage readings accurate enough to do good balancing. If you just want to read the voltages, you can get reasonably close. Dealing with over 50V total and reading individual cells within 10mV is what you want for balancing.

[ih82lose]

Interesting. I have been bench testing an uno fitted with a similar voltage divider circuit paired with a touch screen display showing individual battery voltages in real time. Seems to work well, just have to design a mount for the display.

Might switch over to a due and add gps for a speed display and a Hall effect current monitor. Definitely fun to play with.

[Volt_Ampere]

I was going to use GPS for speedometer but then I realized that it was much easier to use the speed sensor. I made an optical interface to the speed sensor and it works great. I get four pulses per motor revolution for my speedometer / odometer. I have a current shunt for the current monitor but I am having some trouble with that. One problem with instrumenting a golf cart is that nothing is grounded and the controller makes a lot of RFI. I had trouble with my display glitching until I switched from I2C to Serial. Now it is solid. My Arduino board is on top of my Lithium battery and the display is up front so there is an 8 foot cable going between them. I also have a nice temperature sensor for ambient and I am adding a motor temperature sensor as well. I used the Pro Mini board mounted on my own PC board that I designed. The whole thing runs off of the 12V reducer. I am still searching for a better display. the LCD 4 line 20 char display I am using is not that easy to see in bright sunlight. I would like a graphic display so the instruments could be "analog". PM me if you want more details.