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Voltage/Current Reading Offsetting

A project log for 12V Battery Tester

A tester that can be used by high school students to test the batteries for capacity.

willbadenwillbaden 01/04/2015 at 02:280 Comments

After placing a cage around the ends of the high power resistor loads, a test was ran with the new amp meter to verify the robot shop amp meter was being properly read by the UNO. Here is the excerpt of that first test:

Program Run 55 1054 399 1101 4834
Program Run 60 1056 404 1101 4855
Program Run 65 1056 404 1101 4855
Program Run 70 1051 399 1101 4834

Keep in mind that the layout of the comma separated values are:

Program State, Time, Voltage, Current, Resistor loads active, UNO USB voltage

Looking at time stamps 65 and 70 shows the USB voltage changed values along with the current and voltage readings. The external ammeter and voltmeter were not fluctuating this drastically. This appeared that the USB voltage that was seen by the UNO was affecting the reading of the current and voltage.

A discrepancy was also seen in the overall reading that was adjusted out with the newly added offset feature. But the adjustment was not able to correct the change in readings as the USB voltage fluctuated. This can be seen by the next test:

Program Run 15 1060 379 1101 4897
Program Run 20 1057 404 1101 4834

Wanting to get rid of the fluctuation, I chose to use an external 9V supply to feed the UNO. This still did not fix the problem as seen by the next test:

Program Run 70 1135 398 101 4897
Program Run 75 1137 401 101 4918
Program Run 80 1133 397 101 4897

At this point, I started to wonder if it was the external supply or the 5V regulator built into the UNO board. I knew the Relay board could pull a load, but this load may be more than the UNO could supply. To bypass this, I placed an external supply feeding directly into the relay board and USB voltage only to feed the UNO. This did work as seen by the test results:

Program Run 75 1104 370 101 5051
Program Run 80 1108 373 101 5073
Program Run 85 1101 370 101 5051
Program Run 90 1101 369 101 5051
Program Run 95 1098 369 101 5051

The voltage reported by the UNO locked into 5.051V and only once deviated to 5.073V. Along with this, by using the correct offsets for voltage and amperage, the UNO reported values consistent with the external ammeter and volt meter.

The next step is to install a dedicated 5V regulator that will only feed the relay board and be fed by the 12V battery. This will cause a small deviation in the current readings if wired before the ammeters. This will have to be installed after the ammeters so that they will see the current flow.

The problem that I do have with this discovery is that the calculations to correct for this discrepancy were not working. This will also be looked into further.

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