Kickstarter – Quad Power Management Board Full Test

July 6, 2015 Arduino, Arduino Software, Breakout Boards, Quad Power Management I2C Board, SunRover, SwitchDoc Products

Kickstarter – Quad Power Management Board Full TestIMG_5048

Our new kickstarter is “Really, Really Useful Breakout Boards – Arduino/Raspberry Pi” and is located here:

www.kickstarter.com/projects/sunair/really-really-useful-breakout-boards-arduino-raspb

The Kickstarter contains two boards that are useful in Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects for robots, power supplies, solar powered systems and more.  These boards are an inexpensive I2C 8 GPIO Extender and a Quad Power Management I2C Board.

Come pledge and get a great discount on these new products.

Quad Power Management I2C Board System Test

The Quad Power Management I2C Board allows you to switch on and off batteries, power supplies and solar panels.  It is like an I2C controlled quad solid-state relay.

features:

  • I2C controlled
  • 4 Independent Solid State Relays each with LEDs
  • Each is able to switch 20V and 2.3A
  • 4 Additional GPIOs
  • Software drivers for Arduino and Raspberry Pi Included!

We have now completed wiring the Quad Power Management Boards into the SunRover Robot motor power subsystem for our final test. We are pleased to say everything looks really good.

Quad Power Management Board - Battery Stacker/Unstacker
Quad Power Management Board – Battery Stacker/Unstacker

We have three LiPo cells that we stack to provide a nominal 12V to the SunRover Motor Controller.   This is the Battery Stacked Mode.   When we are ready to charge the LiPo batteries, we unstack the batteries and wire them into parallel in order to charge the LiPo batteries from solar panels using SunAirPlus.  You can see in the picture above that we have 11.63V reading from the three stacked LiPo batteries.

Here is the block diagram we followed:

IMG_0969
QPM – Battery Stacker / Unstacker Applicaton

Status

The QPM board looks completely functional.  The software is running stacking and unstacking the batteries.  Here is what the Arduino code looks like for unstacking the batteries.

void unstackBatteryStack(uint8_t i2cmuxchannel)

{

// first turn all off

resetBatteryStack(i2cmuxchannel);

// Turn on grounds first

QuadPower0.setPowerChannel(QuadPower_POWER_CHANNEL_IO1, QuadPower_ON); delay(100);
QuadPower1.setPowerChannel(QuadPower_POWER_CHANNEL_IO0, QuadPower_ON); delay(100);

// Now turn on all the connecting switches to SunAirPlus

QuadPower0.setPowerChannel(QuadPower_POWER_CHANNEL_IO0, QuadPower_ON); delay(100);
QuadPower0.setPowerChannel(QuadPower_POWER_CHANNEL_IO3, QuadPower_ON); delay(100);
QuadPower1.setPowerChannel(QuadPower_POWER_CHANNEL_IO2, QuadPower_ON); delay(100);

}

Quad Power Management Loaded Test

Next is our loaded test where we hook up a 10 Ohm 10W resistor and measure the current through the resistor.  Should read about 1.1A.

10 Ohm 10W Load Resistor
10 Ohm 10W Load Resistor

We added the resistor and the voltage showed as 10.35V, which means that 1.03 Amps were flowing through the batteries and the resistor.

It works under load!!  And yes, the resistor got hot quite quickly.

On to the full system test of the boards using the SunRover Motors and TRex Controller board.