“Talking” Battery Tester

Project Description:

Developments in technology allow for further automation of repetitive, complicated or mundane tasks. Creating a convenient tool to help automate a process was the goal of our project.

The Rideau Valley Soaring Club commissioned a battery tester device that would simplify the battery testing process. The 12V gel cell batteries power their radios and other instruments in the gliders. Club members test their batteries before every flight by conducting a load test. The battery is put under load so it will draw current, and the voltage is monitored over time. The degree of voltage drop observed during the load test indicates if the battery is in good health or has degraded. Testing the batteries before each flight is important as a degraded battery may drop its voltage mid-flight rendering the glider instruments inoperable.

To automate this process, our team has created a device which connects to the battery, performs the load test, outputs a graph on the screen so the user can monitor the voltage, and finally outputs an audio/visual message to indicate the health of the battery. The final screen displays the voltage at the end of the test and a rating out of 10. A different audio clip accompanies the final display depending on the test outcome, hence “Talking” Battery Tester.

Operation is simple: the battery connects to the tester, the user taps the screen to begin the test, the user observes the output message, then the battery is disconnected once the test is over.

The tester makes use of an Arduino microcontroller which reads the battery voltage through a voltage divider circuit. The analog signal is converted and mapped to the graph on the TFT LCD touchscreen. Through use of Pulse Width Modulation, timers and interrupts, an audio clip is played to accompany the test results. The audio clips are stored as an array of bytes on the tester’s flash memory. The Arduino uses SPI to retrieve the characters which are fed to the PWM output connected to the speaker. A Graphical User Interface was designed using Python which allows the user to customize and configure audio and rating values of the battery tester.

We believe this tester will serve the glider club members well. Our team learned a lot about microcontrollers, timers, interrupts, Serial Peripheral Interface, pulse width modulation, and python coding over the course of this project. The tester is fully functioning but has been deliberately created with further development in mind. Our hope is that future developers add even more features to increase the value of the Talking Battery Tester.

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