An Arduino battery timer (Shallow Thoughts)

An Arduino battery timer

I wrote in my OSCON report a few months back that I came home from the conference with an Arduino microcontroller kit and just enough knowledge and software to make LEDs blink. And so it sat, for a month or two, while I tried to come up with some reason I desperately needed a programmable LED blinker (and time to play with it).

But it turned out I actually did have a practical need for a customizable programmable gizmo. One of the problems with R/C combat flying is that you're so focused on keeping track of which plane is yours that it's tough to keep track of how long you've gone on the current battery. You don't want to fly a lithium-polymer battery until it gets so weak you notice the drop in power -- that's really bad for the battery. So you need a timer.

My transmitter (a JR 6102) has a built-in timer, but it's hard to use. As long as you remember to reset it when you turn on the transmitter, it displays minutes and seconds since reset. Great -- so all I need is somebody standing next to me who can read it to me. Looking away from the sky long enough to read the timer is likely to result in flying into a tree, or worse. (The new uber-fancy transmitters have programmable beeping timers. Much more sensible. Maybe some day.)

I could buy a kitchen timer that dings after a set interval, but what's the fun of that? Besides, I could use some extra smarts that kitchen timers don't have. Like audible codes for how long I've flown, so I can make my own decision when to land based on how much throttle I've been using.

Enter the Arduino. Those digital outputs that can make an LED blink work just dandy for powering a little piezo beeper, and it turns out the Atmel ATmega168 has a built-in clock, which you can read by calling millis().

So I wired up the beeper to pin 8 (keeping an LED on pin 13 for debugging) and typed up a trivial timer program, battimer.pde. It gives a couple of short beeps when you turn it on (that's so you know it's on if you can't see it), then gives a short beep at 9 minutes, a long one at 10, shorter one at 11, and thereafter gives (minutes MOD 10) beeps, i.e. two for 12, three for 13 and so forth. Fun and easy, and it works fine at the field once I worked out a way to carry it (it's in a camera bag hanging on my belt, with the beeper outside the bag so I can hear it).

Fun! It could use better codes, and a pause switch (for when I land, fiddle with something then go back up on the same battery). Of course, in the long run I don't actually want to devote my only Arduino kit to being a glorified stopwatch forever. I have further plans to address that, but that's for a later posting ...

Tags: hardware, arduino, electronics, maker
[ 13:10 Oct 27, 2008    More tech/hardware | permalink to this entry | ]