Hi,
Can anyone tell me if it is at all possible to monitor the battery voltage on a RB 532 using winbox?
Thanks,
Clive.
Battery?
Hi,
Yes, if i am running the routerboard 532 off a 12v battery that is being charged. I would like to be able to monitor the voltage of the 12v battery remotely!!
Clive.
we neither sell nor officially support batteries, so you will not be able to monitor any batteries unless they are some clever ones, and for example support SNMP 
Thanks Normis.
This would be a pretty good/easy feature to impliment, i am sure 
Clive.
Voltage measurement would be an excellent feature for not only battery powered sites, but long POE runs or highly loaded POE systems for troubleshooting.
I imagine you could setup some sort of low-voltage disconnect relay aside from the MT. Then use the relay to disconnect an ethernet loopback cable from an unused ethernet port on the MT. Then your ethernet status would indicate charging/power status.
That’s a neat workaround.
Another solution would be to put a comparitor IC and level shifter on an RS232 port - a pretty simple circuit. Then use MT’s “serial port monitor” to give you an indication.
http://www.mikrotik.com/docs/ros/2.9/tools/sigwatch
If you were being really clever, a more complex circuit (resistor ladder, several comparitors) could give you 6-level output (or 6-bit output if you want to write some decode software).
dtr - Data Terminal Ready (pin #4)
rts - Request To Send (pin #7)
cts - Clear To Send (pin #8)
dcd - Data Carrier Detect (pin #1)
ri - Ring Indicator (pin #9)
dsr - Data Set Ready (pin #6)
Regards
Stephen
This is the equipment that we use to monitor battery voltage via TCP/IP over a wireless link in Northern Maine. We have it plugged into Ether3 on an RB532:
http://www.bndcom.com/products.html
I use the version 1 product to monitor the voltage coming from my solar cells, windmill, and battery all at the same time. I can also monitor temperature. Version 2 of the product has 8 voltage inputs and 4 power relays.
All monitored parameters can be graphed via SNMP with MRTG or PRTG or the like. There is Windows software to monitor the board in real-time. It also has an embedded web server.
After having 3 years of uptime on this board in an unheated tower shack, I can vouch for it’s reliability!
how much are those units? Thier website gives no prices.
When we purchased version 1 about 2-3 years ago, it was around $400 shipped. You should contact them to find out for sure, they are very helpful and knowledgeable.
Eric
I am developing a 12v UPS that I want to connect to the RB532 Serial Port so the Mikrotik sends an email when the power: GOES OFF, BATTERY IS LOW, POWER RETURNS
The UPS is designed to run the RB532 + 2 mPCI cards for about 35hours at average WLAN throughput
The microcontroller is a PIC16F877A including a status LCD
I understand that routeros supports the APC smart protocol, which I found some info on the web, but didn’t really find it usefull/understandable
I have not managed to “trick” router os by sending data via the serial port from a PC (Null modem → Hyperterm); Under UPS in Winbox the UPS status status remains OFFLINE
Does anyone know anything about the protocol or what values have to be sent via serial to the mikrotik. What I am after are just 3 states; On mains ; On battery ; battery low
I might also consider writing an ADC program to read the voltage from the battery and send that to the Mikrotik aswell
Once this project is complete I am willing to publish it including PCB’s and PIC source code on the mikrotik WIKI page
Thanks
Stanley Grixti 9H1LO
9H… sounds very close to home 
Very interesting!
I am considering a project involving an off-grid repeater site that must run on solar/wind with diesel backup.
What I would like is continious logging of voltage and charge current from solar/wind, generator auto-start on low voltage and auto-stop when batts are full.
I don’t want to have to login and check status, I want the system to send an alarm SMS on gennie startup and on lo-lo voltage (gennie fail to start).
Anyone running a setup like this? Is this possible with the RMS?
Read this, it’s just what you are looking for!
http://www.bndcom.com/rms/power_relay_project.htm
Eric
Yes, read that one and it’s indeed very interesting!
However, I want to take it even further and allow gennie auto-start.
Can this be done by scripting in the RMS?
Yes. You can do simple scripts with the v1 unit, but they can only automatically be launched by schedule or by changing the input on one of the 5 available I/O pins.
Once the event trigger is fired, you have the commands for Relay 1, 2, and 3 on/off, and the commands to wait 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 seconds between actions.
Using a combination of these commands, BND was able to auto-start their generator using the v1 unit. They either ran the auto-start script daily or had an external circuit that would read the battery voltage and output 5+ volts DC to one of the I/O pins when the battery voltage dropped too low.
If it were me I’d purchase the v2 unit that uses embedded Linux and has greater capability for scripting.
Eric
Nice!
Have you got any more info on this relay project?
The description on their pages is about remote-starting manually.
I don’t have any more info. You should give them a call. They are very nice guys and will be very helpful.
Eric
By the way, aside from power voltage monitoring, it would be very nice if the RouterBOARDs can shut down if the power supply is under some voltage.
I have seen lots of cases, where wireless modules lose their config, or sometimes (happens a lot with CM9) have their configuration eeprom destroyed.
i personally have had this happen a number of times. would be a great feature