Hi Gordon,
such a fuse would not prevent a battery from an internal short-cut in one or more cells... that's in fact what happened to AO-40. Also you have to make such a "failsafe" feature really fail safe, so that it does not hit you in the back if it fails.. These kind of things, like Watchdogs, always sound simple and easy, but very often they are cause for more trouble. We have seen satellites with Watchdogs going mad and resetting computers while it was not necessary and do more harm than good. Clearly, nobody expected that the battery would die so quickly, otherwise some actions would have been done before...
73s Peter DB2OS
Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
On Mon, 2009-10-12 at 03:24 -0400, Luc Leblanc wrote:
40 back, we will. If the voltage is clamped low and there is no other damage, we may end up waiting a long time for a cell to "open", hopefully not as long as for AO-07. ..or it may happen today. No success for even weeks or months does not mean that we won't eventually be successful.
On a more practical note, could there be some sort of failsafe "battery went phut so disconnect it" device? I'm guessing a perfectly ordinary inline fuse would be too simple, but perhaps some sort of mechanical latch that would just pop the battery terminal if it lost power would work.
Gordon MM0YEQ
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