Battery fuel gauges are the unsung hero of the battery world. There’s more to it than just measuring the voltage on the battery terminals,. These little chips are microcontrollers (tiny computers, essentially) that sit inside the battery pack and keep tabs on the battery’s performance for the life of that battery pack.

Texas Instruments makes battery fuel gauges that are small enough to fit in the circuitry of a cell phone, and one of the most common ones that uses this technology are iPhone batteries. These batteries use a single-wire interface called HDQ (which stands for High-Speed Data Queue). It may sound similar to Dallas Semiconductors’ 1-Wire protocol, but the two are completely different and incompatible with each other.

Protocol details

The HDQ protocol can be emulated with a serial port and a little bit of external circuitry. The protocol can be emulated with a serial port at 57600 baud with 8 data bits, no parity bit and 2 stop bits. Because this is a bi-directional bus, an open-drain configuration is needed. Most TTL serial ports are not open-drain, so some circuitry is required to do this. TI’s application note suggests using a CMOS inverter and an N-channel MOSFET along with a 1 kOhm pull-up resistor, but this can be cut down with a 74HC07 open-drain buffer and pull-up resistor.

[EDIT: June 13, 2015 – Corrected schematic]

The HDQ protocol uses a short pulse to indicate a logic 1, with a longer pulse to indicate a logic 0. The data is sent LSB (least significant byte) first, with a 7-bit address and an eighth bit to indicate if the operation is a read or write (0 is read, 1 is write). If it is a read operation, the fuel gauge will respond with one byte of data. As you might think, this is a very slow means of communication; the typical bus speed is 5-7 kilobits per second, but the actual usable throughput will be less than this.

The hack in this is that the bit timing can be made by sending a specially crafted UART byte that meets the timing specifications. Each bit takes up one byte of UART buffer memory, with 24 bytes being enough to perform an HDQ read (the first 8 bytes are echoed back to the PC and need to be ignored by the software). TI’s application note goes into this with a bit more detail.

Windows HDQ utility

HDQ utility icon, in all its pixelated glory.

I have written a small Windows program that will read out the battery’s main data, identify as a certain iPhone battery model (most iPhone batteries are supported), and save a copy of this data to a text file for safekeeping. This program requires the National Instruments LabWindows/CVI Runtime library to run, since I whipped this program up with the first available IDE on my college PC.

Screenshot of HDQ Utility version 0.96

The source code is not yet available (translation: I’m too ashamed of my programming skills to share it with others); however, a Windows executable is available for download below.

You will need to download the National Instruments LabWindows/CVI Runtime to run this program.

Current version (0.96): https://www.dropbox.com/s/pf0vszgfei7s8ly/HDQ%20Utility%200.96.zip?dl=0

Version 0.95: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7xdurbh9qibdftl/HDQ%20Utility%200.95.zip?dl=0

Version 0.9: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cd3esa5us6elfgr/HDQ%20Utility.zip?dl=0

Contributions are always accepted! Email me if you would like to send in a battery for me to analyze, or you can buy me a coffee through PayPal:

[EDIT – July 28, 2016] Welp, looks like the PayPal button’s broken (or was it never working to begin with…?). If you’d like to send anything to me, just give me a shout at ginbot86@gmail.com!

[EDIT – August 2, 2016] Whoops, looks like I never had the button working in the first place. Hopefully it works this time.