Close

Battery Monitoring System

A project log for Mars Rover Project

Building a rover -- one PCB at a time

marsatmacmarsatmac 08/14/2021 at 23:400 Comments

The battery monitoring system is a gateway project to test a discrete method to keeping track of cell voltages based on only using course knowledge to eventually creating a battery management system which is currently in design.

The battery monitoring system has the main goal of monitoring voltage of the LiPo battery systems during use and also used for checking battery packs that are discharged. The main idea was to provide connectivity to the JST balance charge connectors on the LiPo which feeds into a buffer and differential amplifier to find the voltage of each cell in the battery pack. The specific voltage of each cell will  be fed into a Schmidt trigger which will then warn the user if the cell voltage is too low beyond a set reference voltage. 

Through testing we found that the design worked surprisingly well, but it stands to argue that there is a lot more to be done. We plan to rework the project from the ground up introducing more integrated solutions that can provide many more battery protections such as over current, over voltage, over temp, etc and more features. 

Discussions