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The aim of this project was to develop a Battery management system (BMS) for a handheld device. The BMS had to communicate with the device and report information about the state of the battery. In order to prolong the life cycle of the battery package, one important requirement was the ability to conduct cell balancing.
At first, intensive research was done to find suitable integrated circuit. BQ40Z60 from Texas Instruments was chosen because it embedded all the required functionality: charging, gauging and protection into one package.
The solution was proven to fulfil all the requirements.
The BQ40Z60 is a battery management IC but it also includes a programmable microcontroller that is responsible for communicating over the SMBus, leading all the battery protection mechanisms and logging data. This MCU had to be configured and programmed in order for the system to work as expected. Texas Instruments has its own integrated development environment Battery Management Studio for that purpose. It was used to configure, calibrate, program and monitor the system. Furthermore, it enabled to run the battery gauge learning cycle that helped to increase the accuracy of coulomb counter by acquiring the mathematical model of the battery cells.
A separate charging dock shown on the image on the right that could monitor the percentage of the battery was required to conduct device presentations. So I modeled and 3D printed a dock and assembled Arduino board that communicates with the BMS over system management bus (SMBus) and displays the charge status and percentage.
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