Remote battery monitoring

[shall]

Does anyone have a method or a suggestion on how to remotely monitor battery condition (via a tcp/ip connection). I will be putting a relay on a hilltop, powered by batteries , charged with a wind generator. I need to be able to check the condition of the batteries remotely, the relay will be running Star-Os server, which means I will have to have something that can be accessed by IP. Hopefully I am not the first person (foolhardy) to try this.

Any suggestions :idea: :?:

Steve Hall

[georgew]

What you want is a volt meter that has a serial port. Plug that into a serial port on a unix machine. Then either read it manually with cu ot tip (unix serial terminal programs) or write a script that reads it and does something with the number.

I don't know if any of the charge controllers have serial ports, but that would be even better, as long as it was not PC only.

The downside to this is now you have added more hardware to the load of the power plant. so to reduce the negative impact the monitoring machine should be as low-power as possible. The linux-on-a-stick devices are too slow to use as a router, but for a low-power unix machine who's only job is to read a number off of the serial port they are perfect.

But really, if you go to the trouble of building this, you should do the whole job, and make something that monitors multiple thermometers, the power supply voltage and current, the humidity inside the cabinet, as well as switch closures on the door, gate, and anything else you might want to maintain security over... in addition to a volt-meter.

The OutBack Power Systems - MX60 MPPT PV Charge Controller looks like a possible choice for a charge controller with rs232. They are working on a windows program for data logging, but they don't have one yet, so what they are probably doing is just spitting numbers out the serial port, which is easy enough to plug into a unix machine for logging and processing. Of course it is pricy.... Starts at $650.

I have a volt meter I purchased for $99 from Jameco that has a serial port and a temprature probe (!). You can set it to make one measurement, and it just sends the data out a serial port. If you wanted to measure voltage, temprature and current, you would need to buy three of them, and have a unix machine with three serial ports. Really you only need the voltage if you are just monitoring battery charge state.

I just checked, and jameco still has that meter, only it's $109 now, part number 117372 www.jameco.com.

[Anonymous]

I got this link off the wisp@part-15.org list.

http://rms.nethop.net/

It has a REALLY good look to this. Price, I can't say.

It's precisely what you want, however.



Mark

[dkii]

I just purchased one of these http://www.dcf.sk/microweb/index.html with the humidity, temp, and voltage monitors. So far it seems to be working well. I'm feeding my box with 48v from 4 12v batteries, but the voltage monitor only accepts a max of 18v, so I pulled 12v off the first battery. Using mrtg to monitor everything. The humidity seems to top out at 80% though. Total cost with shipping was around $270 with shipping

[shall]

Thanks guys, the one from 'dcf' looks like it will suit, $270 compared to $395 for the 'nethop' one.
I will order one today

Steve