Only released in EOL distros:   indigo jade

About

The m4atx_battery_monitor package will read the information from a m4atx battery supply and publish it as a ros message.

Nodes

m4atx_battery_monitor_node

m4atx_battery_monitor_node will read in the information from the m4atx and publish the information.

Published Topics

battery_status_m4atx ('m4atx_batter_monitor/PowerReading')

• publishes the Power information

Parameters

~diag_frequency (double, default: 1.0)

• the frequency at which to poll the power supply

~input_nominal (double, default: 13.8)

• the nominal voltage when the battery supply is fully charged

~battery_dead_voltage (double, default: 10.5)

• the voltage at which the battery is considered dead (at a 0% charge)

Permissions

A startup script is provided which will perform the following commands.

lsusb 

Locate the bus and device number of the device called "MicroChip Technology, Inc.".

sudo chmod a+rw /dev/bus/usb/<bus_num>/<device_num>

Where the bus_num and device_num were found above using lsusb.

Installation

To install the m4atx_battery_monitor package, you can choose to either install from source, or from the Ubuntu package:

Source

To install from source, execute the following:

•    1 cd /path/to/your/catkin/workspace/src
     2 git clone https://github.com/WPI-RAIL/m4atx_battery_monitor.git
     3 cd /path/to/your/catkin/workspace
     4 catkin_make 
     5 catkin_make install
  

Ubuntu Package

To install the Ubuntu package, execute the following:

• sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-m4atx-battery-monitor

Startup

The ros_ethernet_rmp package contains a m4atx-battery-monitor.launch file. This file launches an instance of the m4atx_battery_monitor_node. To launch these nodes the following command can be used:

• roslaunch m4atx_battery_monitor_node m4atx_battery_monitor_node.launch 

Now the node will publish the information as well as use espeak to inform the user of a state of charge less than or equal to 20%.

Support

Please send bug reports to the GitHub Issue Tracker. Feel free to contact me at any point with questions and comments.

• Russell Toris

  • rctoris@wpi.edu

  • Academic Website