Battery Voltage Indicator

Many enthusiast and motorcycle rider ride their bike, using electric starter to start the engine undoubtly knowing the battery gone flat, charging system might have gone down but no visual indicator that the system indeed is not charging or have problems...so in the first place why not build one to visualize you anything bout battery voltage on board the bike.

Using pic microcontroller and little components, you can create one like as shown.

It will indicate your battery voltage in a glance from idle up until you rev the bike. it will indicate also if the system is overcharging or not.

CIRCUIT and CIRCUIT description:

The project is designed for use in instrument panels and electrical power supplies with some slight modification for on board motorcycle voltage indicator. You can also use popular types of chips - PIC16F873A-PIC16F876A, with slight changes in the program.

The heart of the circuit is based on pic16f818 with little components to perform the basic function of analog to digital conversion. The inverter used was a BC557 for a common anode seven segment display. R1 and Rv1 is there for input voltage adjustment to display the right voltage. The PCB was made using SMD components and only the oscillator, sense resistor, the input protection zener diode and the calibration r1 and rv1 uses the thru hole components.

As shown was the PIC16f818 SOIC already soldered to the board. The PCB was made by abascom sprint layout type and can be downloaded only by email.

Board with parts already populated and soldered to their proper area.

the seven segment attached to the main board.

The Seven segment display actually was derived from an old machine. you can use any seven segment of your choice but since i am trying to embedd it on my original panel, size matters.

Here when i powered the unit with a 12 volts motorcycle battery, and adjusted with the same reading of a DVM. the unit is ready for use on motorcycle.