ASCII Character Low Battery Warning

This "Instructable" proposes a method to send an alert ASCII character as a low battery or voltage warning.

I made my "https://www.instructables.com/Temperature-and-Humidity-Data-Transmitter/" remote with re-chargeable batteries and so a low battery warning would be useful: ( I considered that solar was too much trouble as the batteries would last a good long time).

It occurred to me that I could send a single ASCII character using a 4017 Counter/Divider as I remembered that the CLOCK input was Schmitt triggered.

Parts required are a "Larson Runner" kit, a transistor inverter-divider and variable resistor to give the battery voltage level, a transistor line driver and isolating diodes.

The idea is to use the Schmitt CLOCK input as the Battery level sense and code the sequencer output to give an 8 bit ASCII code.

Looking at the 4017 block diagram shows that the CLOCK INHIBIT can be used as a CLOCK input. The outputs will need to be combined with isolating diodes.

The 4017 has 10 outputs meaning that a START bit, 1 parity, 7 character bits and a STOP bit can be sent and the 555 timer would be set to give the Bit Rate desired.

Any ASCII character can be set by placing a diode in each position when a SPACE (low) is wanted: I thought the "BELL" character was the obvious character to send but bear in mind that it will continue being sent until the battery is fully exhausted or removed!

The ASCII bell character's value is 7 ( 0000111) and is named "BELL" or "BEL".

I will post further details an diagrams when it is all installed.