Monthly Archives: May 2021

Battery Monitor Review 12 month update

12 volt, 4X4, battery management system, battery mangement sytem, battery monitor, bluetooth, crimping, tips, wire, terminals, lugs, review

The BLE Battery Monitor was reviewed here.

All three BLE battery monitors have now been working for 12 months, monitoring two AGM batteries and now one Lithium battery. All are still working. The original review stands after 12 months.

Parasitic drain

The BLE battery monitor does have a parasitic drain on the battery which cannot be picked up by the Battery Management System on The Doc’s Invicta 125 Ah lithium battery. So the battery can be slowly drained over time with the BMS still showing a 100% charge. It seems the draw of the BLE and the BMS itself are too small for the BMS to monitor.

BLE App being updated

The BLE App has been updated probably three times over the year. Minimal features upgraded, but good it is to see regular maintenance updates.

Lithium battery issues

The BLE is not designed to be used on Lithium batteries, so it does not properly monitor the charge, as a Lithium battery has a different voltage profile to an AGM. The BMS has a Bluetooth module that communicates to the Invicta’s App, giving The Doc all the details about the battery. The BLE allows The Doc to see what happens over 30 days and graphs that data.

Conclusion

Money well spent.

Barks, barks and more barks

Australia, bark, Plant, Textures

As part of the ongoing macro work on barks and foliage, The Doc was describing the various hues in the barks and leaves, he looked for a way to be more objective and found a colour palette generator that identified the ten dominant hues in an image. Some samples can be found below.

The ten most dominate colours in the bark/leaf are listed on the left. The source image was in 8bit colour with an sRGB colour profile embedded.

It is a visual colour palette of the main colours in the bark or leaf, it is not scientifically exact.

Colour names based the hexadecimal RGB colour code: https://www.99colors.net/color-names

The Doc much prefers the names of colours rather than their Hex code (#FFEBCD) or RGB code (255, 235, 205), otherwise known as Blanched Almond. Others names include Caput mortuum, Cerulean blue, Dogwood rose, Otter brown and Dark candy apple red.

Why does the colour palette look slightly different to the image? In the colour palette you see each distinct colour, but the image is a mixture of these colours and more. In essence, it is like looking at an artist’s various paint colours, before the colours are mixed and put on the canvas. The palette is just identifying the ten main colours used by nature, not how nature mixes all the colours.