Analog inputs to monitor batteries?

Anyone here wire in the servo supply (Vs) to an A to D input (AX0-AX3) to monitor the power of the servo battery?

I imagine a divider circuit would be necessary for any analog voltages exceeding 5V?

If I am not mistaken there are already jumpers on the bot board to do that… it would be good to look in the manual at page 2 item 8 in the description. :wink:

haha that’s already built into the Bot Board II. :smiley:

All you need to do is install the jumper and read the input. We routed VS to AX0 and VL to AX1. There is a voltage divider that drops the voltage by 25%. So a 9vdc battery (assuming it’s 9vdc) will leave 2.25vdc at the input of the regulator.

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of doing on the bot board. That pair of header near AX0 and AX1 where you can feed in VS and VL into those A to D ports.

I was looking at the schematic of the mini-ABB, this header is “J2” I presume? The header with the 30k and 10k voltage divider? The reason why I’m asking is because you mentioned bot board II but I’m using its precursor, the venerable mini-ABB… This divider would indeed give you a 0.25 Vin (where Vin is VS or VL) since it’s 10k/40K*Vin. This feature is quite nice, I believe I will jump in the VS supply into the botboard and make the mini-ABB chime a tone through the speaker when low voltage is detected…

I’ve also been using the LED-based battery checker as well, which works really nice, I recommend this to everyone. The “meter” effect and what you see visually under load is quite interesting (like when all 18 servos are commanded, the level dips down a bit, thus indicating the heavy current pull on the battery)…

Now what would be interesting is interfacing the bot board with an LCD to give you a poor-man’s voltmeter to show the status of the on board batteries…

:wink:

The ABB is the same as the Bot Board II as far as the battery monitor circuit is concerned. :smiley: