I am working on a new design that will incorporate a battery backup, similar to a UPS. The battery that we will use will either be a 12V 100Ah or 12V 1Ah SLA (system is configurable at time of purchase to have one or the other). I have been looking through the forums and through the technical literature including battery management solutions, etc and it looks like there are enough special cases to make pairing a charger and gas gauge tricky.
I am leaning toward using the BQ2031 as the charger since it is well documented, seems to do what I need, has an EVM and is in stock. Is this a good choice for a new design?
I am having trouble discerning what gas gauge IC to use because on page 19 of battery management solutions of the 3 ICs listed for Lead Acid, the bq78412 and bq2013H are both non-stock parts. The BQ2060A seems to get good reviews and is in stock, with decent documentation but this post says it is not recommended for new designs unless they are using nickel based chemistry. So is there a better solution?
More information on my application:
-Since I am planning on using a separate charging IC, I only need the gas gauge function out of the gas gauge IC (some of them report other information that can be used to control charging/discharging).
-I need to be able to easily read the SOC/mAh remaining into a PIC32 so I can update an LCD from there.
Thanks in advance for you advice,
Tim
P.S. I originally posted this in the chargers forum and Chris suggested I look into the bq246xx parts and ask you guys about the gas gauge. Thanks.
