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A. Carloni, F. Baronti, R. Di Rienzo, R. Roncella, R. Saletti: "Open and Flexible Li-ion Battery Tester Based on Python Language and Raspberry Pi", Electronics 2018, vol. 7, no. 12, pp. 454, Dec. 2018

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Technology improvements and cost reduction allow electrochemical energy storage systems based on Lithium-ion cells to massively be used in medium-power applications, where the low system cost is the major constraint. Battery pack maintenance services are expected to be required more often in the future. For this reason, a low-cost instrumentation able to characterize the cells of a battery pack is needed. Several works use low-cost programmable units as Li-ion cell tester, but they are generally based on proprietary-software running on a personal computer. This work introduces an open-source software architecture based on Python language to control common low-cost commercial laboratory instruments. The Python software application is executed on a Raspberry Pi board, which represents the control block of the hardware architecture, instead of a personal computer. The good results obtained during the validation process demonstrate that the proposed cell station tester features measurement accuracy and precision suitable for the characterization of Li-ion cells. Finally, as a simple example of application, the state of health of twenty 40 Ah LiFePO4 cells belonging to a battery pack used in an E-scooter was successfully determined.
File: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/7/12/454