State of charge information to Pixhawk

Ground Control Software Mission Planner
1

Hello,

This project I am working on was inspired by the deficiencies in MP which make it so MP believes that any battery plugged in has a 100% charge state, even if that’s not actually the case. So, if you have a battery that is at 90% and plug it in, MP will report that your battery is at 100% charge.

My solution is I am developing a state-of-charge (SOC) estimator for a battery pack using a current sensor and Arduino. The Arduino will use an EKF to perform accurate state estimation, and then store that SOC value in onboard memory (EEPROM).

My question is, how do I send the SOC information to the Pixhawk such that it will report to Mission Planner the actual state of charge? I know that I2C is the interface I want to use, but once I’ve sent the data to Pixhawk, how do I make sure Pixhawk is indeed updating the battery state of charge info in the Power Module?

Thanks for reading and hopefully replying :smiley:

2

SOC is not a MP function, this is reported by the autopilot.

3

Right. So where in the arduplane code is the part that reads the incoming data from slave address 0x0B for SMbus? (like it says here: copter.ardupilot.tridgell.net/wi … t-battery/)

I have the arduino interfaced with Pixhawk in I2C and the arduino acts as a slave…how do I make sure that the SOC value from arduino is being fed into the SOC value in the autopilot?