Mononymous self-described “electronics and fast prototyping fanatic” Greg has constructed an digital enterprise card that serves a second, sensible goal: a battery tester for these CR2032, AA, and AAA batteries you have bought sliding across the backside of your drawer.
“I’ve wished to make a PCB enterprise card that is prone to hold getting used, slightly than simply touchdown on the backside of a recruiter’s drawer,” Greg explains. “A battery tester is one thing most even non-technical individuals would possibly truly use, and when you additionally hand the individual a battery to mess around with, the 47 flashy LEDs will magically come to life and exhibit that… effectively, I could make electronics and demonstrably they generally even work.”
This enterprise card is one you will at all times need to hold helpful — as a result of it is a fully-functional battery tester. (📷: Greg/TechnologyWasAMistake)
The cardboard works as a enterprise card in precisely the best way you’d count on from an electronics fanatic: the PCB features a silkscreen layer that holds the proprietor’s title and call info, full with QR Code for fast scanning. This, nevertheless, is positioned round a pair of cutouts within the board — sized so as to slot a AA or AAA battery in place.
As soon as linked to energy, the cardboard’s WCH Electronics CH32V003 microcontroller — a 32-bit RISC-V chip common for its extraordinarily low price — fires into life and measures the voltage accessible from the battery, studying out the consequence on a surface-mount LED numerical show to the upper-right in addition to a quick-read LED bar graph to the aspect. There’s one other space for testing a CR2032 battery, and an LED tester for good measure.
Greg has revealed design recordsdata and supply code for the venture to GitLab underneath the Artistic Commons Attribution 4.0 Worldwide license; extra info is out there on Hackaday.io.