Hello,
Please bear with me as I am new to the forum and the hardware...
I have a customer that is using a battery pack gas gauge made up of BQ30Z55-R1 devices. The customer has requested that we use an Allen Bradley PLC to communicate with the battery pack over SMBus to confirm it's charge level. Reviewing the tech data sheet, it looks like the 0x0E Absolute State of Charge query could be used to read the charge level information the customer is looking for. If there is a better command for this, please let us know.
Since the customer would like to use a PLC to perform the communications, we are considering using an EV2400 evaluation board which can connect via USB and using a serial to USB converter to send ASCII command information from the PLC through the EV2400 to the battery pack gas gauge. Can you tell me if this is feasible and whether or not has this been done before? If this is not feasible, is there any other piece of COTS hardware that will allow an Allen Bradley PLC to communicate to the BQ30Z55-R1 devices and what protocol would be required?
Thanks in advance...
Tom