12V Battery Monitoring

1

I am looking to work on a project that can monitor various batteries on a boat. I have four battery banks that need monitoring. My initial thought was a Raspberry Pi and four INA219s to monitor each bank. I have subsequently read INA169’s instead so am now a bit confused (it doesn’t take much). Can anyone recommend a better option, and perhaps even a “read this”?

TIA

2

Hi Paul,

Are you looking to monitor the current being output from the batteries or just the voltage of the batteries?

3

Just voltage

4

Hi Paul,

If you use some controller that has analog input this would be much simpler. The Pi has no analog to digital converter, so you would need to use an external one:


This can only read up to 5v though, so you will need to make a voltage divider.
https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/voltage-dividers/all

Or you can buy one:

and feed that into your ADC, then into the Pi. Make sure everything shares a common ground or you can fry your electronics!