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Fuel Guage Documentation and bqStudio - Serious ambiguity issues in the language used - wasted a lot of time!

James Walmsley
Prodigy 10 points
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: BQSTUDIO, BQ34Z100-G1

Hi,

I just wanted to voice my frustration with the fuel-guage documentation and bqStudio related to learning cycles.

1. Color encoding of bits in bqStudio is completely illogical:

Currently green is used to denote a '0' or cleared bit in a register, where red is used to denote a '1' or set bit in a register.
This is completely counter-intuitive and confusing. I spent many hours trying to understand why my fuel guage was behaving completely unexpected before I resorted to looking at the raw data in the registers and interpreting from the HEX codes and documentation.

Please change the default color scheme!!

2. Forum discussions talk about items going red, or sometimes active, or being set. I think there should be a consistent use of language surrounding this, especially one that can be easily related to bqStudio - perhaps a legend on the GUI.

3. There is no single and comprehensive document to describe the learning process. I have read several documents relating to different fuel guages. The language used is always ambiguous! E.g. it is never stated anywhere that between discharging the battery and relaxing the user is expected to wait for the OCVTAKEN bit to be set and other events. From the language one can assume that you discharge the battery and relax the battery, and then you can reset or attach the fuel guage -- expecting it to detect the initial relaxed state. This is jarring and frustrating when the fuel guage doesn't behave like it says in the documentation.

I think the biggest problem is the sheer amount of time required to do this process, and therefore any mistakes made by the user can waste a lot of time. Because of this, the risk to the user of getting it wrong is huge making it difficult for the user to invest time to experiment with.

I think that most sane people will get to the end of using bqStudio and not report there experience to TI simply because it was so frustrating and they are glad it is over.

Please fix this!! 

Kind regards,

James


p.s. I'm using the bq34z100-g1 and I'm quite happy with the chip itself.