Well, it took one week’s all free time and big parts of some nights too. Hardware arrived after some ebay-shopping on last friday and was assembled and tested in about one hour, thanks to excellent guide from AlastairC in Helifreak here.
The code for the RC-Thoughts Jeti-Tools RFID-Battery application was a monster. Result is about three times bigger app than any other I’ve done. I had to learn some new programming-ways but it’s all just for the good, I learned a lot, again :)
RFID-Battery
Application is truly feature-rich:
- One app to all models, up to 15 batteries per model
- Automatic battery identification based on ID-number from RFID-tag
- RFID-info is ID, Capacity (mAh), Cycle-count and Cell-count
- Automatic detection of 2-pack config (For example two 7S in 14S use)
- Automatic detection of empty battery when powering model
- Empty battery on powering -alarm has repeatable and user selectable voice-alert
- Used capacity alarm has repeatable and user selectable voice-alert
- Several different telemetry screens available based on available information
- Warning and info-screen on main screen
- Minimal setting required
- Allows usage of batteries with any voltage, capacity in one model without doing several overlapping telemetry-warnings etc
- All settings are model-specific
And for the first time with Jeti, true battery-information logging!
- A new line is added to logfile after every successful cycle
- Data includes date/time, Model name, battery name, battery capacity, used capacity and cycle-count
- Log is written in comma delimited csv-format with date and time in ISO 8601 format for perfect platform-independent compatibility
- Log is common for all models collecting all batteries usage to one file
Hardware How-To?
Don’t worry, will come online very soon!
Go and check the application out here!
Awesome. Can we tweak it to read Revolectrix Bump tags?
At present day no. I would need some Revo-tags to test with and first of all I see no reason for me to buy them, I'm on iCharger-setup.
I contacted Revo several months ago and discussed this since this is an old idea I wanted to do and possibly sell, it would have been cool to build it Revo-compatible. I wanted to make a compatible unit, Revo said they would come back to me after thinking of NDA and talking to their lawyers, they never came back. So I went with open-source instead since it's quick and basically everything is already made.
The cost of full setup + 10 pcs of RFID-tags done this way is cheaper than 12 Revo-tags alone… :)
Looking forward to the hardware info.
Do you have links to where I could order a couple of the RC522 Mini and Arduino Pro Minis?
Sure:
Reader/Writer similar to this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/2pcs-New-RC522-RFID-Read-Write-Card-Module-IC-RF-Card-Inductive-Module-13-56MHz-/111961999186?hash=item1a11748752:g:olwAAOSw8RJXB1f6
Arduino similar to this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Mini-ATMEAG328-3-3V-8Mhz-Replace-ATmega128-For-Arduino-Pro-Mini-Compatible-/221528768176?hash=item339424beb0:g:4UQAAOSwzLlXg2Ay
Tags: http://www.ebay.com/itm/10PCS-13-56MHZ-1K-S50-NFC-Tag-PVC-Waterproof-Adhesive-Label-Smart-RFID-/182138562771?hash=item2a684de8d3:g:auwAAOSwmc1XPW0H
(Tags are a bit of a lottery from ebay, but in case of miss the loss it not that big)
IMPORTANT: RFID-board takes 3.3V, do not use 5V 16Mhz Arduino without a step-down circuit. Easiest is to use Arduino Pro Mini 3.3V 8Mhz, my apps are tested on that.