Hello everyone in my hand is a super tiny 3.7V Li-Ion 4-level battery indicator. Hardware designers love it because it’s cheap, saves a ton of board space, and requires zero programming.
You’ll find these everywhere in budget power banks, rechargeable fans, Bluetooth speakers, and more. Next time you see four glowing dots on a gadget, you’ll know exactly what’s doing the heavy lifting.
The Breakdown of HM1160's 6-Pins: ---------------------------- * Pin 1 (VDD): Connects directly to the battery's positive terminal to read the voltage. * Pin 2 (GND): Ground (Negative terminal). * Pin 3 D4 LED outputs. * Pin 4 D3 LED outputs. * Pin 5 D4 LED outputs. * Pin 6 D1 LED outputs.
The Logic (How it lights up): ----------------------------- The chip uses internal voltage dividers to check the battery level against fixed thresholds. If it sees over 4.0V, it lights all the LEDs. If it drops below 3.4V, only one flashes, telling you it's time to plug it in. It consumes virtually zero power when the lights are off, so it doesn't drain your device.
Hello everyone, in my hand is a super tiny 3.7V lithium-ion 4-level battery indicator.
Hardware designers love it because it's cheap, saves a ton of board space, and requires
zero programming. You'll find this everywhere in budget power banks, rechargeable fans,
Bluetooth speaker, and more. Next time you see four glowing dots on a gadget,
you'll know exactly what's doing the heavy lifting.
In one of my recent short videos, I talked about the world's smallest lithium-ion battery
charging protection board. Just imagine pairing that with this tiny 4-level battery indicator
would be a huge win for any compact circuit board.
On the front of the board, you have got four SMD LEDs and solder pads for the
battery's positive and negative wires. On devices with rechargeable batteries,
every time you press the button to check the battery level, a tiny brain does the math.
But if you look close to the board, there is no big computer chip. It's just this tiny
So, what is it? That 60 AA chip on the back is actually called the HM1160. Back in day,
you'd need a pile of resistors and a bulky chip called the comparator to do its job.
But the HM1160 packs everything into a package smaller than a grain of rice.
It's a specialized, ultra-compact, single-cell lithium battery level indicator chip in an
SOT23-6 package. It measures the battery's voltage and directly drives a series of LEDs
to show how much charge is left. Instead of using a complex microcontroller that needs programming,
this tiny chip does it all natively. It constantly monitors the battery voltage
running at less than 10 microamps. As the battery drains, it automatically turns off
the four indicator LEDs one by one, typically at 100%, 75%, 50%, and 25%.
To understand how it works, you need to know how lithium-ion batteries behave.
They don't just sit at 3.7V all the time. Fully charged, they are at 4.2V. Empty,
they drop to about 3V. A battery indicator module is essentially a tiny voltmeter that measures that
exact voltage drop. Drop a comment if you have seen this chip before and follow for
more hardware teardowns like this.
