modeltronics

My Feedback: (27)

I'm looking for a little advice. I built a battery cycler that can do 10 packs at a time. I'm using a 286 computer as a controler. The source code is written in Pascal. The system puts a preset load on the battery packs and reads back the voltage once every 5 minutes. The voltage readings are stored in ASCII format in a file that I can pull into an Excel spread sheet. When the pack hits the cut off voltage the load switches out and it goes to a slow charge.

Now my question is about the load on the battery packs. Right now I am using an op-amp constant current load of 200 mA. The load is the same if the pack is a 100 mA/hour pack or a 10,000 mA/hour pack. The math for calculating how many mA/hours the pack is good for was easy to put right into the program. Is there a variable in what the load should be with regards to the size of the pack?

Thanks

Pete

Geistware

My Feedback: (16)

I would recommend setting the load to the application.
If you are running several digital servos with a peak load of 2-3 amps, it really doesn't make sense to only test the pack at 200ma. This is just my opinion, I would have various banks that can be switched on so the accumulative can be selected. May be 200ma, 500ma, 1000ma, 300ma. you can select the paths you want to be able to get 200ma to 2 amps of load.

modeltronics

My Feedback: (27)

That would be easy to do and I can make it switch the loads via the software. For the amount of time I put into this project I could have just gone out and bought a cycler but I liked the idea of being able to write the data on the battery packs to the hard drive. Besides.... what else is a 286 computer good for?

Pete

modeltronics

My Feedback: (27)

What is the load that cyclers use that you can buy? Is there any cyclers out there that have a variable load?

Geistware

My Feedback: (16)

My Cycler has a fixed 300ma load. The only use I see is for a standard and point of reference. My plane uses 8 Hi-Torque servos, and my new plane will be using 4 Hi-Torque and 4 Digitals so a 300ma load is too small.