EarthX Lithium battery fault monitoring

[astirpilot]

EarthX has recently come out with a Lithium (LiFePo) battery specifically for experimental aircraft use (ETX680), The battery contains an integrated battery management system (BMS) with fault monitoring. According to the battery user manual (earthxmotorsports.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ETX_Manual_111017_K.pdf), the fault monitor for the BMS is “a discrete output that can be connected to many aircraft Electronic Flight Instrument System (EFIS) electronics or to a remote mounted LED.” The BMS connects the discrete output from an EFIS to battery ground if a fault is present.
Because of the nature of lithium batteries, a BMS is very important in an aircraft application. In fact Rotax requires a BMS for any lithium battery used with their engine installation. Fault monitoring would be nice. However the BMS outputs two possible failure states on a single wire. One is a steady, one is flashing (5 second cycle time).
Can the Skyview system handle this type of input? It seems like the flashing input would cause multiple repeat warnings. If it’s not currently possible, is it possible to add that capability? It would be nice to have as much protection from a lithium battery fault as possible.

 

[dynonsupport]

This should work fine today. Just set the input as a "latching" alert and you'll only get one alert until you acknowledge the alert.

 

[Dynon]

You can use a style of warning on the EMS contact inputs (what you'd use for this application) that we call "latching". In this case, the first time something alarms, the audio warning goes off and the message area button flashes. The WARNING button "latches" into its alert state (flashing the button) until you acknowledge it by pressing the WARNING button to view and ack the message. Until you've done that, although the button keeps flashing (because there's a new alarm that you haven't seen), you don't get repeated audio alarms, even if the condition clears and reappears.

So in a nutshell, this gives you most of what you want, I think. If your light flashes, you'd get an audio alert; you'd also get a flashing light in the widget you've set up and on the alert area button. But you wouldn't get repeat audio alerts unless you cleared the existing latched alert (which you wouldn't want to do in this case, because the light flashing off and on would simply reactivate it moments later).