Introduction: Battery Checker

About: 4D Makers is a group of curious engineers and enthusiasts who finds great satisfaction in creating and building anything from electronics.

The battery checker uses a gen4-uLCD-28DT which uses the Diablo16 Graphics LCD Processor. The Diablo16 processor has an Analog to Digital converter which can measure voltages up to 3.3 volts. This project could be easily extended to measure more than 3.3V by scaling the voltage down by using a voltage divider before inputting to the module.

Step 1: Build

Components

  • gen4-uLCD-28DT
  • gen4-PA
  • 1 x 22ohm resistor
  • 2 x 10K ohm resistor
  • battery holder

Build the circuit as shown in the diagram

Step 2: Program

  1. Download the project file here.
  2. Open the project using Workshop 4. This project uses the Visi Environment. You can modify the properties of each widget.
  3. Click on the Build Copy/Load button. Note: This step could be skipped. However, compiling is essential for debugging purposes.
  4. Connect the display to the PC using uUSB-PA5 and a mini USB cable. Make sure that you are connected to the right port. Red Button indicates that the device is not connected, Blue Button indicates that the device is connected to the right port.
  5. Now click on the “Build” button.
  6. Workshop 4 will prompt you to select a drive to copy the image files to a uSD Card. After selecting the correct drive, click OK.
  7. The module will prompt you to insert the uSD card. Properly unmount the uSD card from the PC and insert it to the uSD card slot of the display module.