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| Setting up an HP6060B for use as a Battery Capacity tester |
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| Gandalf_Sr:
I got an HP6060B a while back with battery capacity testing in mind. Now I come to use it it looks like you can only get constant current, constant voltage, or constant resistance from the front panel controls. What's really needed is to draw a constant current from the battery until it drops to a specified voltage, ideally with Watt-hours recorded. Does anyone have any advice on how to use it for battery capacity testing? I think using it with GPIB will do what I need but what (free) software is available for that and do I need to roll my own code? |
| alm:
If it does not have a undervoltage limit (does not seem that way), I see two solutions. The first would be to connect an analog comparator to the voltage monitor output, and have it either drive the external trigger input or remote voltage programming input to reduce the set current. The alternative would be software that continuously checks the measured voltage and shuts down the load when it crosses a certain threshold. Because this is a fairly slow process (the battery is not going to run flat in a millisecond), this should work fine. Since you probably also want to record voltage and current over time so you can do integration over time, the software solution seems to be the obvious one to me. If there is off the shelf software, it would probably made by HP/Agilent around the time the loads were released. |
| nctnico:
I rolled my own software for a different load. If you dump the data to a CSV file you can create a graph using Excel so no need to make something really fancy. |
| Gandalf_Sr:
Thanks, I won't get to this for a few weeks but writing code to control instruments is something I'm keen to get into. I've been working with Visual Studio, Windows Forms, and VB.Net recently, can anyone point me to what technology / command sets / drivers I would use to command HP/Agilent/Keysight instruments over Ethernet and GPIB (I have an HP E5810A LAN / GBIP gateway). |
| alm:
The E5810A is supported by the current Keysight VISA (IO Libraries). Pretty sure it includes .NET bindings. Keysight may have sample code available in C#. You would then be sending commands as described in the 6060B manual. If you want further abstraction, you could search for an IVI driver for the HP 6060B. That would give you an easier interface that is standardized across different manufactures/models. |
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