Battery Level Monitoring

[mkj01]

Hello,

 

I’m currently in the middle of a personal project to automate watering my vegetable beds. One of the goals is that this system should be battery powered, and trickle charged off a solar panel or two. I’d quite like to include some form of battery monitoring. The documentation for the Voltage/Current sensor suggests that this can be done using bidirectional current measurement, but doesn’t elaborate more than that. Online, I find various sources suggesting how to monitor battery levels, but they aren’t very clear, or I've been looking in the wrong place.

 

Do you have any advice for battery monitoring with the voltage/current bricklet? Due to the solar panels, I’d imagine this would impact the measurements until the evening when the sun goes down, or can that be accounted for?

 

Thanks,

 

Mike

 

[xsherlock]

Are you planning to use solar charge controller for the battery, or you want to do it exclusively on the TF bricks? How big the panel and battery do you want to use?

I do something similar for the night lights in the kids treehouse right now but will use external charge controler with MPPT tracker to charge the lipo batery pack of around 150Wh.  V/C bricklet just for reporting back to house the status.

 

Maciej