On 27 Jan 10:40, Chris G wrote:
On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 10:33:59AM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:
Please define "external battery". Is this "external battery" a UPS unit? If so, why not just query the UPS?
No, the "external battery" is simply the 400 Ah 'Leisure' battery on the boat. Come to think of it though you may have pointed me at a possibility, the battery charger that maintains the leisure battery has a remote display which has presumably some sort of interface to drive it. It could well be that I can get information from there into the computer.
If you've got a parallel port on the computer that's attached you could make a fairly simple circuit that puts one of the pins high on the parallel port and then read the status using some Evil Code (tm).
If there's no other way of interfacing with the charger, that'd probably be the way I'd go.