There have been some exciting developments in battery technology over the past several years.  I am currently working on a project that uses one of the latest battery chemistries (Lithium Ferro-Phosphate).  These batteries have one of the highest power densities, can be fast charged without degradation, and have a safe pulse discharge rate greater than 100C.  This means that the “EXCITING” can be just that in the development environment if not handled safely!

The system I am working on is designed to replace a Lead/Acid system used in Hospital environments.  It represents a Quantum Leap in functionality in this application, and eliminates hazardous materials found in the Lead/Acid unit it replaces.  It has excellent hardware safety designed in by Cliff Gerhard.  My contribution is the firmware for several elements of the system, the Battery Safety/Controller, The Charge Controller, and the Main Controller which contains several adjustable high current DC outputs and communicates via USB to a host computer for monitoring and administration.  I have also designed the monitoring and administration applications for the Host using C# 2008 and the .NET Framework v2.0 (.NET Framework v2.0 was chosen for down level compatibility to Windows 2000).

Altogether a fun project…