FENIX ARB-L18-3400 RECHARGEABLE 18650 BATTERY

The Fenix ARB-L18-3400 is a high capacity 18650 Li-ion rechargeable with a protection circuit in the anode to help prevent short circuits, over charge/discharge and over heating. The battery also includes pressure relief vents which expel waste gas in the rare case of an internal short circuit preventing an explosion.

Integration in the project

To use the Motors an 6-12V input is required. For this project and max speed of the motors 2X 3.6V batteries are used, what gives an 7.2V input voltage with 3400mAh.

The Fenix ARB-L18-3400 where used in this project because of the inter technology. Prototyping with battery input can be dangerous and you can easily kill an li-ion battery, So to be able to work in the safest conditions this battery is used because of his intern security technology.

On full power the robot batteries can last for approximately 45 minutes.

Battery voltage

To be able to secure the components and the controller, a voltage detection is needed to shut down the circuit when the batteries drop below the minimum voltage.

To solve the problem of only analogue in, an ADC is an added to convert analog to digital.

Voltage divider

A voltage divider circuit is a very common circuit that takes a higher voltage and converts it to a lower one by using a pair of resistors. The formula for calculating the output voltage is based on Ohms Law and is shown below.

$Vout = \frac{Vs*R5}{R4+R5}$
$5V ≈ \frac{7V2*150K}{100K+150K}$

Code

The following code prints out when the voltage goes under 5V.

while True:    print(chan.value)    if chan.value>56549: #56549 is the valuo that indecates 4.99V         print("Battery +5V")    else:        print("Battery -5V" )

Polarity Protection

To prevent the circuit against inverted polarity by switching the input voltage or the batteries. A P-channel mosfet is used to secure the circuit.

The huge benefit by using a p-channel mosfet belongs to the fact that no additional high side driver circuit is needed. Compared to an n-channel mosfet, the device will be turned on by applying a negative Gate Source voltage. By referring the Gate signal to the ground line, the device is fully turned on when the battery is applied in the right polarity.

By reverse polarity, the MOSFET will be switched off, because the Gate Source voltage in this case will be positive.

References

Polarity Protection- Marco Pürschel(14/01/09)[SOURCE]