Arduino UPS / Battery Shield

We just picked up a LIPO shield from Adafruit, which allows us to battery power our projects.

The shield contains a optional 2Ah LIPO battery, and recharges from a mini usb cable (same as a Kindle).

You can power your project from the shield on battery power, or plug in the cable, and it charges the battery and acts like a online UPS, powering your project. LED’s show power on, charging, charged, and low battery status, and you can monitor battery voltage on one of your analog pins.

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All we had to install was the extended headers, and the optional power switch (finally, you can power off the arduino). Stack the shield, plug in the battery and a usb cable for charging when necessary, and you are set to go.

We used a Ada Fruit RGB I2C LCD Shield
Make sure you download the Adafruit Libraries for the LCD.

// set up the voltage monitor
// select the input pin for the battery voltage. 
//Make sure you solder the correct pad on the bottom 
//of the power boost shield.
int sensorPin = A2;    
// variable to store the value coming from the battery
int sensorValue = 0;

//measure your AREF pin and replace our 
//measured value of 4.77v
float stepVolt = 4.77/1024.0;

// include the library code:
#include <Wire.h>
#include <Adafruit_MCP23017.h>
#include <Adafruit_RGBLCDShield.h>

// The shield uses the I2C SCL and SDA pins. On classic Arduinos
// this is Analog 4 and 5 so you can’t use those for analogRead() anymore
// However, you can connect other I2C sensors to the I2C bus and share
// the I2C bus.
Adafruit_RGBLCDShield lcd = Adafruit_RGBLCDShield();

// These #defines make it easy to set the backlight color
#define RED 0x1
#define YELLOW 0x3
#define GREEN 0x2
#define TEAL 0x6
#define BLUE 0x4
#define VIOLET 0x5
#define WHITE 0x7

void setup() {
// Debugging output
//Serial.begin(9600);
// set up the LCD’s number of columns and rows:
lcd.begin(16, 2);
lcd.setBacklight(YELLOW);
lcd.setCursor(0,0);
lcd.print(“Battery Voltage”);
}

void loop() {
sensorValue = analogRead(sensorPin);
lcd.setCursor(0,1);
lcd.print(sensorValue*stepVolt);
delay(5000);
}

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