Hi together,
I have an Arduino Nano project, where I created a timer which is triggered by a reed sensor. This timer has a datalogger functionality, so it stores the logged actions together with a timestamp on the EEPROM. I'm just logging 5-10 actions per week, so the EEPROM should last for a while.
Currently I have a USB powerbank to power my timer. But unfortunately through the housing of my timer, one can't see the battery level of the powerbank. So I would like to integrate a battery gauge. Therefore I disassembled the powerbank and bought a Coulomb Counter LTC4150, because I read this is the way to go with LiIon batteries. My plan is to go with the LTC4150 between the battery and the electronics of the powerbank. I read the tutorial of the LTC4150 and I'm confident I will get it to work, but I have some questions though. Here is the link to the datasheet of the Counter.
- The LTC4150 only measures how much power goes in or out of the battery. In order to get a correct level gauge I need to detect when the battery is empty or full. How can I do that?
- Is it necessary to have a code in the background which is measuring the battery capacity in order to calibrate the level gauge or is this negligible? (the accuracy doesn't have to be really high)
- How should I wire up my timer with the LTC4150 and the battery? So far I have a hardware switch which disconnects the timer from the battery in order to switch it off. But if I do this I will loose the battery level. I read that the current of the LTC4150 in shutdown mode is only ~10µA, and my battery is ~1500mAh, so there would be no problem to keep it always connected. But the Timer uses something like 10mA, which will drain my battery pretty fast, even if switched off. My intention is to avoid writing the battery level to the EEPROM, because I think this would reduce the lifetime of my arduino pretty fast.
I appreciate your help a lot. Thank you very much.
Kind regards
David