Hi there,
I was pretty inactive at visforvoltage.org for the last few weeks.
Now I do have some more time and want to present you my Feigao Power Analyzer
and the modification work I did to improve the handling on EVs.
I bought it some months ago at unitedhobbies.com for about 36USD.
Initially I wanted to buy a Watt's Up but afterwards came up with the Powe Analyzer for reasons like it's affordability and the data logging feature.
So here is some Basic information about it:
I expect most of you know some similar measuring tools e.g. DrainBrain or Watt's Up.
The Feigao Power Analyzer does pretty the same but additionally has a serial interface to log all the measured data with your PC and illustrate it in graphs etc...
Basic characteristics as given in the user manual:
Voltage measuring 0-100Volts
Power measuring 0-10000Watts
Amp-hours 0-9.999AH
Watt-hours 0-999.9WH
Volts: The displayed voltage is the voltage at the POWER SOURCE side of the
Power Analyzer.
Current: The Power Analyzer has two ranges for current, that is, 0-19Amps and
20-100Amps. It automatically switches between high and low range. Low current
range has a resolution of 0.05A. High current range has a resolution of 0.1A.
Watts: The amount of power flowing from the POWE SOURCE to the LOAD,
definition is:
Watts=Amps×Voltage
Amp-hours: The displayed amp-hours indicates how much current has flowed
from the POWER SOURCE to the LOAD. Measurement refers to the definition
forehead.
Watt-hours: The displayed watt-hours indicate how much power has flowed from
the POWER SOURCE to the LOAD. Measurement refers to the definition
forehead.
So this is what the Feigao Power Analyzer is about, but for EVs I wasn't pleased with the
combined shunt/display device. It's always good to keep your wires short and using such a device would initially force you to wire your power cables in front of you (e.g. handlebar mounting).
To avoid this I separated the display unit of the Analyzer and it worked pretty well :-)
After removing the housing of the Power Analyzer you can see the following:
The upper board (display unit) is just pinned onto the lower part (shunt unit).
So separating wasn't a problem at all. Afterwards I simply soldered single cables (14 strands) at the pins and connected the other side to the soldering points at the display unit.
To cover the units I used shrink tubes which I usually use for my batteries.
That's how it looks now ;-)in some way it reminds me of some kind of RC model controller with display unit :D
A gallery with some more pictures in greater resolution can be found here:
` :) Max,
Glad to see you among the living again, we will add the USER MANUAL FOR
FEIGAO POWER ANALYZER to our EV DownLoad Library ASAP.
Regards,
Board Moderator
Cheers,
Board Moderator
Oooh, this looks like a really good find. It's rated for higher power than the batteryspace meters I have, and it does data recording.
Any idea yet how "real" their ratings are? How reliable is this?
- David Herron, http://davidherron.com/
- David Herron, The Long Tail Pipe, davidherron.com, 7gen.com, What is Reiki
I haven't used it much yet but from what others said to me this is (within its accuracy) pretty reliable.
For what I have measured now it seems to work fine and the measured data is realistic.
Since I don't have any other Ampere meters I can't compare it's reliability but for example the measured voltage is accurate compared to what my multimeters are telling me.
For the data recording thing....there is just a serial bus interface with which you can record the measured data in real time as long as a computer is connected. Hence it's not recording any data itself, just sending the currently measured data to a PC. This is fine at home when you are charging batteries and want some charging characteristics to be displayed. At your EV it's nothing more than a Watt's Up....just showing you what's going on with your power usage. Besides I had something different in mind for it. I came up with the idea of connecting it to a PDA or Palm which under given circumstances should also be able to catch the output data of the Power Analyzer's interface.
I actually don't know exactly how to do this but in principle you just need to find a way to control your Palm's serial port for data recording. For this reason it's also fine for me that it's a serial port rater than an USB interface which could make such things quite more complicated :-)