Device for battery management

[Dan Pollock]

Looking for a device that has a ros interface to monitor the battery on my robot. Using one of those plug in alarms now but I'm hoping there is a similar device out there that will interface with ROS.

Also I'm trying to figure out a way to have a "dead mans switch" that will cut the battery off from the rest of the bot if the voltage gets too low. I have cut offs on the motor controller and the dc-dc converter for the jetsons but I'd like some kind of back up that is a total cut off upstream from any electronics. Thinking a relay but if you cut the power how would it keep the contact open? Not that familiar with that type of thing so any suggestions much appreciated.

[Mike Purvis]

Hi Dan,

You could consider building a bespoke battery monitor from an Arduino or other simple microcontroller board. This could handle the cut-off functionality for you, and also talk to your computer using rosserial to publish battery state to the rest of the system.

See this example for a small taste: http://wiki.ros.org/rosserial_arduino/Tutorials/Arduino%20Oscilloscope

Note that you could also take advantage of the new smart_battery_msgs package, whereas an off-the-shelf battery monitor would likely require writing this logic as a driver on the PC side: http://wiki.ros.org/smart_battery_msgs

Mike

On 18 November 2015 at 13:40, Dan Pollock <pollock...@gmail.com> wrote:

Looking for a device that has a ros interface to monitor the battery on my robot. Using one of those plug in alarms now but I'm hoping there is a similar device out there that will interface with ROS.

Also I'm trying to figure out a way to have a "dead mans switch" that will cut the battery off from the rest of the bot if the voltage gets too low. I have cut offs on the motor controller and the dc-dc converter for the jetsons but I'd like some kind of back up that is a total cut off upstream from any electronics. Thinking a relay but if you cut the power how would it keep the contact open? Not that familiar with that type of thing so any suggestions much appreciated.

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