“When finding out that one cell of my 3x 4S 1300mAh batteries were discharged to 3.3-3.4V (other cells were 3.7-3.8V) after not flying for 2-3 months, I was a bit surprised, these batteries were one of my first batteries purchased about 1.2 years ago. I’ve tried to be better now, checking packs every month, I’ve got some old packs for the RC car that hardly get used so I wrote down the idea to do battery storage voltage monitoring a few months ago so let’s make it happen.
I’m thinking of using the nRF24L01 module (as it’s pretty low cost), using an ATtiny24/44/84 which should give us 6S support and have it powered from the first cell of the LiPo, it shouldn’t take too much current from the first cell as we stay in sleep/power down most of the time. Add in a few resistors, led, mosfets to turn on when we want to measure the voltage. I will coat the PCB in lacquer and cover it with heat shrink to protect against the environment and since the board needs to be as small as possible, I’m going to try the SMD version of the nRF24.
Check-in times for these sensors might be in the range of hours as battery voltage won’t change too much, it would be nice to have a graph over say 30 days but I might look into that later if I feel it’s worth doing, for the moment it will just show the sensor number, cells, status if it’s ok or not, battery cell voltages and last check in time. Server side would just be an ESP8266 with the nRF24L01 directly attached so no need for any other MCUs.”