Battery monitor and data-logger

Test & Measurement

18 April 2012 Test & Measurement

In installations that require large banks of batteries, such as telecom towers, it is often very difficult to establish the cause of backup system failures.

The cause could be the battery charger, the load, air conditioner or battery failure. The responsibility for these four components is often borne by different vendors, making individual liability a difficult task.

When a failure happens and the individual system component cannot be easily determined, the cost normally falls onto the owner of the installation.

Locally developed, manufactured and supported, the LittleBigB is a high-performance, low-cost battery monitor and data-logger. Applications include battery monitoring for warranty purposes, system performance verification and system optimisation.

The device performs live measurements of voltage, current and temperature with calculated capacity. It is easy to install and logs all data once a minute to a removable SD card. Standalone operation is guaranteed by large data capacity requiring no interfacing, linking or periodic downloads; 15 years of data can be logged on a 2 GB SD card.

The system features a non-volatile alarm output. There are user programmable alarms for voltage high, voltage low, charge current high, discharge current high, over charge, under charge and high temperature. Alarms are flagged and logged separately into separate memory space with time stamping allowing easy browsing through the large amounts of data.

LittleBigB consumes less than 15mA and is available in 12 V, 24 V and 48 V versions from ±150 A to ±1200 A. It comes standard with free PC application software which reads the SD card log using the dedicated SD card reader. The software also provides graphical viewing of the voltage, current and temperature with time stamps.

The software makes it possible to read the list of all alarm events and save them to an events list, as well as the ability to jump directly to each logged alarm event. It enables zooming by day, week or monthly and logged data can be saved to PC, while saved PC files can be recalled and exported to CSV.

For more information contact JVES, +27 (0)11 887 7222, [email protected], www.jves.co.za

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Battery monitor and data-logger

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