Battery Dashboard

Inspiration

With the advancement of electricity as a mobile power source for both vehicles and marinecraft, creating cheap interfaces to battery control and diagnostics systems is in high demand. Our project can be easily incorporated into any electric vehicle or boat utilizing a central battery management system. Currently existing solutions are many times more expensive, are challenging to purchase, and do not have as comprehensive analytics.

What it does

We provide a clean interface to see the status of the batteries in your system. It is simple to add a screen such as ours onto a car or boat. We take in the voltage, current, state of charge, and temperature in the form of an analog voltage level reading. We then calculate out that number into meaningful statistics.

How I built it

We used an lcd screen powered by an arduino to display the metrics. We gathered the data through sensors on the battery management system and translated voltage levels into human readable quantities such as percent charge.

Challenges we ran into

We broke our lcd the first night so we suffered some major set backs in actually getting the displays to print out. There was a lot of experimentation to figure out what the voltage levels from the battery sensors correspond to in metrics we were familiar with. Also it was difficult getting my partner up in the morning.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

These were new technologies for us that we are excited to be able to use for other projects. Having never worked together before we also figured out how to work well together to utilize each of our strengths. We reduced the cost and improved the usefulness of a product that will be an essential piece in a growing industry.

What I learned

Patience! There was lots of tinkering to figure out how each of our hardware pieces worked alone and then to get them all to work together. We tested out our system on small batteries for safety.

What's next for Battery Dashboard

Once we confirm calibration of our code, we will use a 3D printer to make a housing for the unit. This housing will then be used in an ongoing project that involves designing a full-size electric raceboat with the goal of breaking the world speed record on water. Additional future plans include using a SparkCore microcontroller with wifi capabilities to live-stream the data to a webpage and use a smartphone to interactively view and record parameters. At this point it will be close to being ready to enter the market for electric cars and boats worldwide!