Battery Protection

Published on 2017-02-20 in D1 Mini Tote.

I did some more work both on this project and on the SpiderWing . I debugged the leg IK code finally – it was all about reversed servo directions. I also tested different parameters for the creep gait, and I can tell it will take some time to tune this properly.

However, in the process of doing that, I ran the LiPo batteries on those robots to dangerously low voltage levels. Fortunately I noticed and re-charged them quickly, so hopefully the damage is not that big, but this made me actually go looking at the schematics and reading datasheets.

It turns out that neither the Adafruit Feather not the D1 Mini Battery Shield have a built-in overdischarge protection, as I assumed they would. They only have a charger and a voltage regulator (a boost converter in the case of the D1 Mini). They assume, apparently, that the battery has the protection circuit built-in. Of course the 16340 batteries that I’m using have no such thing. So it’s back to the drawing board.

I considered various options:

All of those have their advantages and disadvantages, and I think I’m going to choose different options for the two different designs.

For the D1 Mini Tote, I don’t care much about how complex the board will become – it requires soldering of SMD chips anyways, so if I ever make this available, that will probably be with the board pre- soldered. In that situation, a hardware battery protection is a better thing – it works even if there is a bug in your software, or when that crashes. I also don’t like the battery shield very much. So I decided to go with a battery charger module with a built-in voltage protection on it. I had a few of those on hand already, and I tested them briefly – they seem to work just fine. So I reworked the PCB to include the pins for the charging module, and to not require the battery shield anymore. There will still be a separate USB socket for charging – there is no way I can access the data pins on the D1 Mini to connect the sockets together, and the robot will still have to be switched on for charging – I have bad experiences with leaving anything connected to the battery with the switch in the off position: I want the switch to cut the battery completely.

For the SpiderWing , I went with a voltage divider initially. It would be perfect to just connect it to A6 or A7 – the analog-only pins that I’m not using anyways – of the ATmega, however, they are not broken out in the DIP package. So now I have a choice between using one of the servo pins (which I really could, since I have 8 more than I really need), or using the Feather’s analog pin and run the check in Python. I made some PCB designs for both approaches, but just now, while I was writing all this, I had another idea. The ATmega includes internal reference voltage that I can measure against the voltage the chip is powered from. That means, that if I power the ATmega directly from the battery, I can check the battery voltage without the need for any extra components or pins. Well, OK, I will need a filtering capacitor then, because the servos make a lot of noise, but it should work. Unfortunately, right now I’m powering the ATmega from the 3.3V pin of the Feather – because it’s nice, stabilized and filtered. In any case, I would really prefer to have the check in the ATmega, and not on the Feather – it’s more robust that way against users uploading their own programs.