Home-brew battery measuring station

[BrianG]

A sort of battery vault is the ultimate goal. It would also be important that all tests be consistent and repeatable. And then, there is the question of credibility; will people trust test data from a possibly biased forum member?

Yeah, I suppose you could have banks of resistors to get in the ballpark of the current you want to test. I was envisioning several such banks all wired in parallel with CPU heatsinks and fans on them. I want to eliminate as much contact/wire resistance as possible, because at resistances less than 1 ohm, any little bit can make a big difference! Don't forget, I am talking about measuring 100's of amps here...

Not pictured, but I was also thinking of adding caps to the ouput. Since resistors are a resistive load (duh), the caps would smooth out the PWM pulses to provide a more consistent draw. Priobably use a spare car audio cap for that, but would be limited to ~5s because of the voltage rating.

Eagletree would be the way to go, but I was shooting for cheap and effective. The teade-off being lack of sampling/plottable measurements.