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Voltage meter for use on motorcycles
Former Member
How hard would it be to have a voltage meter option instead of the normal charging indicator? A lot of people with GPS units hardwired to a motorcycle have a number of other electronics wired in as well. We're limited on available voltage and overdrawing on the battery can have serious consequences. I have a basic led voltage indicator. But something integrated into the GPS itself would be incredibly useful.
The voltage supplied to the GPS device is always 5V... It is not relevant anyway; I guess you mean the current it draws. For a typical GPS it's way less than 1A; nothing to worry about. Things like heated grips really matter, but you can't measure that with your GPS...
This is a little outside the scope of a forum for Garmin "fitness devices", but Garmin Marine GPS's do have a battery alarm that you can set to alert when the voltage drops below a user definable level. It has been useful on my sailboat where most of the engine instrumentation is in locations you don't normally look at and the engine is not running most of the time, but electrical draw can still be heavy relatively heavy.
The supply voltage on these Marine gps devices is twelve volts. It likely gets stepped down as soon as it enters the unit, but the full voltage is still available for monitoring. I suspect the Aviation devices are designed for twelve volt supplies too.
Current draws only give you a way to figure out how long your battery may last. Voltage, as the OP ask for tells you a little about the present state of the battery and some idea of when you are low on starting capacity of the battery. Not perfect, but useful.
