Hacking DrDAQ for Improved Accuracy

I needed to measure the discharge characteristics of 12 V leisure batteries for work.

Manually taking readings every minute or so, over periods of 10 to 20 hours, is not a
practical proposition; some sort of low cost automated solution was needed.
Given that this was a work project, time for making the test equipment functional was
strictly limited. The time taken to pick the appropriate test equipment was also strictly
limited; hence there is no guarantee that the solution chosen is the cheapest or the best. It
is nevertheless adequate.
Having chosen DrDAQ as the acquisition system it was then required to interface DrDAQ
to the battery. A leisure battery on charge could read up to about 15 V and given that
DrDAQ has a maximum input range of 10 V some sort of input attenuation is needed. A
DMM was used to confirm that the input resistance of DrDAQ is 1 M on all ranges. A
470 K series resistor should give a suitable scaling to the native 10 V range.
470k
input

The actual input of DrDAQ sees a reduced

input signal by an amount of

R2
R1
1Meg

1M
1.00

1M 470 K 1.47

If DrDAQ reports 10 V the input must have

been 14.7 V. We therefore need to scale
DrDAQ readings by something like 1.47, the
exact value depending on the resistor
tolerances.
The 470 K resistor is best placed inside a shielded BNC box, as shown below.

Leslie Green CEng MIEE

1 of 7

March 2015

The range from 14.7V to +14.7V is converted with 8-bit resolution in DrDAQ. The steps in
2 14.7 29.4

115 mV .
the readings are therefore
256
28
There are two basic approaches to improving the measurement resolution: either improve
the resolution of the acquisition device or back off some of the DC input voltage with a
stable DC reference. I chose the first method, given that I wanted a self-contained and
transportable measurement device.
As it turns out the Picolog software has an over-sampling mode built into it. What this does
is it takes multiple samples and averages them together. A noisy signal would have
reduced noise and improved resolution. 1 But a battery voltage is not a noisy signal, so you
do not get much improvement just using the over-sampling. However, when you add a
dither signal the improvement seems almost miraculous (see the results graph on page 6).
DrDAQ has a built-in waveform generator. If you set this to a 10 Hz triangular waveform of
1.5 V peak this can act as a suitable dither waveform. It is necessary to connect the
waveform generator output to the oscilloscope input via a 10 M resistor to give a suitable
signal strength.
WARNING: If you solder the 10M resistor between the signal pins of the BNCs, as
shown below, you will void (invalidate) your warranty. Also, if you are clumsy with your
soldering you could melt the insulator on the BNC socket.
There are two wires on each BNC socket. If it is not obvious to you which is the signal wire
and which is the ground, you probably shouldnt be soldering resistors between the pins!
Connect up the circuit off-board using BNC connectors and wires instead.

Oversampling with dither is a well documented method of improving resolution. See, for example, CH 11 of
ANALOG SEEKrets.

Leslie Green CEng MIEE

2 of 7

March 2015

The electrical circuit with the dither injection resistor (R3) is shown below 2
470k
input

R2
R3
10Meg

R1
1Meg

V1

The 10 M dither injection resistor gives a little bit more attenuation of the input signal,
meaning the 1.47 nominal gain factor will need to be increased to 1.517.
It is important to remember that this modification to DrDAQ is a hack. It is not supported by
the manufacturer or by me. Earlier or later versions of the software and hardware are not
guaranteed to support this functionality.
Picolog does not have the ability to set the waveform generator (or if it does, I didnt spot
it). In order to make waveform generator active I first fired up the Picoscope software
(v6.10.11.15) and set the amplitude, frequency, offset, and waveshape as required.

It turns out that shutting down the Picoscope software (currently) does not disable the
waveform generator. Starting the Picolog software, v5.24.2, (currently) does not change
the state of the waveform generator. If you unplug the USB connection, or turn off the host
computer, you will obviously have to go through this sequence again to re-enable the
waveform generator.
2

The circuit was drawn using the free circuit simulator SIMetrix Intro v 7.00e, although I tweaked the resistor
and ground symbols to make them look prettier.

Leslie Green CEng MIEE

3 of 7

March 2015

The Picolog software was set to real time continuous sampling, with as many samples
averaged as possible, and the resultant data points being saved every 30 seconds. At 1ms
per sample this averages 30,000 samples into one data point!
It is worth saying something about the scaling of the result. You could just export the raw
data to a spreadsheet and do both the gain and offset scaling there. However, DrDAQ has
several built-in methods of doing the scaling so it was convenient to use one of them. I
didnt read about all the different methods. Time being an expensive commodity at work, I
found one that worked and left it at that.
The most obvious method of scaling the data is to short the input terminals to do the zero
calibration then apply a typical input signal and gain-scale the result until it agrees with
another piece of test equipment, in this case a bench DVM. In my case the region of most
interest is really the range from 11.00 V to 12.50 V. Linearity errors in DrDAQ could easily
be significant now that the oversampling has increased the resolution. It is not that the
oversampling has made the linearity any worse, its just that the expectation of an
improved accuracy of result will be unnecessarily limited by the native non-linearity of the
8-bit converter. The rule here is to calibrate that part of the range you want to be most
accurate.
Using the equation scaling feature of DrDAQ means using an equation such as
(X+0.011) * 1.517
The 0.011 term is the offset and the 1.517 term is the gain. This is the best form of the
scaling equation if you are doing a zero and gain calibration. If you are calibrating a small
part of the range, as in this case, it is slightly easier to use an equation such as
0.016 + (X * 1.517)
Setting the gain and offset is not especially difficult. I am spelling it out here for
completeness, but feel free to skim over the next few paragraphs if you feel I am insulting
your intelligence.
The first thing to do is to set the gain accurately. With a calibrator one could apply exactly
11.000 V, but I dont have a calibrator, just a power supply and a bench DVM; the accuracy
with which I can set the 11.000 V is limited. It is clearly advisable to leave DrDAQ on and
measuring a representative voltage for 10 - 20 minutes before doing the calibration in
order to ensure that it is warmed up and therefore stable.
input
reading
11.010 V
11.153V
12.503 V
12.643 V
= 1.493 V = 1.490 V
These are the actual values found. The difference-value was slightly too low so the gain
factor was increased. These readings were taken using the nominal gain scaling factor of
1.517, so this was changed to

1.493
1.517 1.520 . The new gain factor was applied
1.490

and the offset was adjusted to make the 11V value correct. Because of noise the readings
Leslie Green CEng MIEE

4 of 7

March 2015

are not going to be exactly equal, just close enough. Checking a few random voltages
within the working range suggested a maximum error relative to my 5-digit reference DVM
of 10mV, an impressive 0.1% of reading. (Dont expect that level of accuracy to be
maintained over time or ambient temperature changes though!)
The equation scaling is quite a way down the dialog box chain!

Leslie Green CEng MIEE

5 of 7

March 2015

The no-dither test result below was the first discharge test on the battery. The charge state
was as received from the supplier and the DrDAQ calibration was not done as carefully
as the later test. The key point to notice is the definite steps in the un-dithered
measurement, which correspond with the ADC quantisation levels of DrDAQ.
The dithered response shows no evidence of finite ADC resolution on this scale.

The little recovery of on-load voltage with a few minutes of switch-on is interesting. I
suspect that the discharge current heated the battery up and that caused the voltage to
rise. I know that the on-load battery voltage drops at low temperature because I later left
one of these batteries in an environmental chamber for several hours at 0C and the cell
voltage was markedly lower than on other tests at the same initial charge state and
discharge current.

Leslie Green CEng MIEE

6 of 7

March 2015

Here is the battery and discharge setup

The advantages of using the LD300 active load include giving a constant power load and
disconnecting the load when the battery reaches a defined lower limit. This allows
unattended discharge testing without killing the battery by over-discharge.

It is true that I used some expensive equipment for this testing, but it was just laying
around in the lab. I had to go out and buy DrDAQ because I didnt otherwise have a simple
automated measurement scheme.

Leslie Green CEng MIEE

7 of 7

March 2015