Ancel BA101 Battery Tester serial data parser

The Ancel BA101 lead-acid Battery Tester is an easy to use and versatile lead-acid battery tester for car, UPS or other similar batteries. The tester has a mini-USB serial output port which can be used to log and report the measured test data. Unfortunately the software that it comes with is proprietary, closed source, runs only on Windows and it cannot be downloaded without making an account on the Ancel website.

This repo proposes a platform agnostic python3 script which connects to a serial port, receives the data from the Ancel BA101 Battery Tester and displays it in the terminal so that it can be logged and/or printed as needed.

It can be run directly on both Windows and Linux.

Read the Ancel BA101 manual here: Ancel_BA101_User_manual.pdf

Official Ancel product page: https://www.ancel.com/products/ancel-ba101

Requirements

• Python 3 installed
• Python 3 serial library: pip install pyserial

How to use

1. Connect Ancel BA101 via USB cable to PC.
2. Open a terminal and run ./ancel_data_print.py with serial port argumnet (e.g. /dev/ttyUSB0 for Linux, COM3 for Windows).
3. The script will wait for data to be received.
4. On the Ancel BA101 tester, go to Print Data and press Enter.
5. The data will be displayed in the Terminal. Press Ctrl+C to close, or send new data agin until manually stopped.

Example:

$ ./ancel_data_print.py COM3
Ancel BA101 Battery Tester serial data parser.
Opening serial port COM3 at 9600 baud...
Listening for data... Press Ctrl+C to stop.

====== Battery Test ======
Status:             GOOD BATTERY
Voltage:            13.19V
Charge:             100%
Health:             100%
Rated:              135A
Measured:           193A
Standard:           CA
Internal Res:       15.82mΩ

====== Cranking Test ======
Cranking Time:      1550ms
Cranking Voltage:   7.45V
Cranking Status:    LOW

====== Charging Test ======
Loaded Voltage:     12.50V
Unloaded Voltage:   14.89V
Ripple:             15mV
Charging Status:    LOW

Serial data format specification

The data format specification was not provided by Ancel, but was manually reverse engineered. Some values might be not right.

Offset	Raw data example	Decoded data example	Meaning
0	E6 7C	-	Initial marker (?)
2	1A	-	??
3	00	GOOD	Battery status 00: GOOD 01: GOOD, RECHARGE 02: BAD, REPLACE 03: REPLACE 04: CHARGE & RETEST
4	05 14	1300	Battery voltage x 0.01V
6	00 C3	195	Measured amps
8	06 1D	1565	Internal resistance x 0.01mΩ
10	00 64	100	Health percentage
12	00 64	100	Charge percentage
14	00 87	135	Rated amps (A)
16	0A	CA	Selected measuring standard 01: CCA 02: DIN 03: JIS 04: EN 05: IEC 06: GB 07: SAE 08: MCA 09: BCI 0A: CA
17	01 2C	300	Cranking time (ms)
19	01	NORMAL	Cranking status 01: NORMAL 02: LOW
20	03 E8	1000	Cranking voltage x 0.01V
22	05 AA	1450	Unloaded voltage x 0.01V
24	05 6E	1390	Loaded voltage x 0.01V
26	00 0C	12	Ripple (mV)
28	01	LOW	Charging status 00: NO OUTPUT 01: LOW 02: NORMAL 03: HIGH
29	FE 7F	-	Final marker (?)