Other Parts Discussed in Thread: EV2400
First, I'm new to BQ Studio, BQ40Z60 and even Li batteries. The capability of this IC is a bit overwhelming, but it appears to be a cost effective solution for my project, so I am designing it in, planning to ignore about 75% of the capabilities of the chip. Specifically, what I am doing is managing 4S generic 26650 LiNiMnCo cells. There will be a wall transformer charge/power input and a permanently attached switchable load. The portions of the IC that I need are: SMPS charging, including CC and CV and end of charge voltage/timer; cell balancing and fuel gauge. I will also use the basic protection circuits, although things like overcurrent aren't real likely (the load is a PCB that the BQ40Z60 is on, and draws C/10. Charging will probably be C/3).
Now to the question. I see significant value in BQ Studio to help design and test the solution as well as program ICs for production. But my board will be managing the I2C (OK SMB) bus itself, so that doesn't seem to bode well for using something like EV2300 or EV2400 to communicate with BQ Studio. The product will contain (among other things) a USB based virtual COM port with a command parser. How easy would it be to interface BQ Studio to that? I have a fair degree of freedom in tailoring commands to the BQ40Z60. The interface doesn't seem like it would be very hard. The IC is a bunch of memory mapped registers, so if my parser understood a read and write command that got passed through to the IC from BQ studio, I would think that would cover everything. Alternately, a command that did an SMB read and one for write, would be another way. The only issues would be how data was represented, ASCII HEX, raw binary, etc. I'm sure there is already a similar interface/protocol for the EV2300 or EV2400.
Maybe most of this has been done, and I just need to meet an interface standard or tweek a plug-in. I'm not crazy about writing/modifying Windows code, as my tools are limited. OTOH, I can do just about anything on the device side. There is an ARM Cortex A9 at my disposal.
