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Subject: 
Voltage Sensor
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Mon, 16 Sep 2002 10:31:01 GMT
Viewed: 
554 times
  
Hello fellow Mindstomers,

I am seeking some direction in the development of a Voltage Sensor I wish to
use with my RCX.

I have solar cell connected to a 12Volt (1.3A) sealed lead acid battery via
a small trickle charger PCB (bought as a kit). The solar cell charges the
battery when sun permits. Connected to the battery I have a voltage
regulator (again, bought as a kit) to bring the output of the battery to 9
Volts, which I then feed to various lego components. i.e motors, lights,
RCX, etc. This works well.

What I want to do is to be able to monitor the batteries voltage via a RCX
sensor input
I have made the following assumptions
1    Sensor type should be a "Light sensor"  - In order to monitor a 0V - 5V
sensor input reading
2    Use a General Purpose Analog Interface as per Michael Gasperi's fab web
site http://www.plazaearth.com/usr/gasperi/gpa.htm
3    Use some sort of 'resistive divider' setup to bring the monitored
battery output voltage within the 0V - 5V input range of the sensor.
http://news.lugnet.com/robotics/?n=18648
4    Convert the sensor reading within a RCX program to bring it back to the
0V - 12V range


My questions are:
1    Is this the 'right' way to go about this sort of thing?
2    What is the arrangement of the resisters in a 'resistive divider' setup
relative to the battery and the analog interface.
3    How might these affect the reading generated in the analog interface
given that it also has a resistor (R1 @ 2.2K)?
4    By reducing voltage am I going to overload the sensor input on my RCX
(i.e fry it with too much current)
5    Am I reinventing the wheel here, and a simpler way already exists to
measure voltage through a RCX on external battery sources.

Thanks for your time

Tom Beattie



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Voltage Sensor
 
Are you powering the RCX from this battery? If so you can use the RCX it'self to monitor the battery. task main() { while (true) { SetUserDisplay(BatteryLevel(), 3); } } I use this to detect if my 1.0 RCX is plugged in or on batterys. Hope that (...) (22 years ago, 16-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

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