Wednesday, July 24, 2019

iMAX b6acv2 battery charger (part 1: logging and graphing)

I purchased a iMAX B6AC V2 multi-chemistry battery charger for use with RC cars, and immediately installed the official application under Windows.  It allowed me to control various functions as per the display and buttons on the actual device, and in addition offered realtime graphs.  They worked!  however, it was immediately obvious that this would never do.  I couldn't save the graphs, nor could i access the raw data, and starting a new charge/discharge resulted in the previous data being destroyed.  wtf!!

I went on a bit of a hunt and found Logview and a reboot called Logview Studio.  I installed both on Windows.  Logview didn't recognize the charger at all.  Logview Studio did, however when it came to recording data nothing actually appeared.  More concerning was that it seems development stopped with the most recent versions for both being released around September 2014.

So then went to my old faithful, why did i ever doubt you, the open source community.  Pretty quickly i found GNU DataExplorer and being a Java app it ran ok on Windows.  On OSX i need to do some rubbish to allow me to access the device via USB, so i shelved that.  Under Linux (Ubuntu 18.04) it's sufficient to be root, although with the correct permissions i shouldn't need to sudo.

Here's a pic of me proving to an ebay vendor that their 1800mah battery really isn't.  Leave positive feedback they said..!

No comments: