Such a method can be used, in particular, to determine the battery condition of a battery, for example an automobile battery. In order to determine a battery condition, it is typically necessary to measure the battery current. This can also be referred to as the load current. For this purpose, highly accurate resistors or sensors are typically used to measure the magnetic field strength in embodiments according to the prior art. The disadvantages of the previous embodiments are, in particular, the high costs, in particular for creating resistor materials which have more or less constant resistance values in a conventional temperature range of −40° C. to 105° C., for example. One example of such a material is a copper/nickel/manganese alloy, for example Manganin.
A current measurement may be provided, for example, for use in battery sensors for the downstream calculation of physical variables of a battery.
There have been approaches for some time to replacing a highly precise resistor as a measuring resistor, also referred to as a shunt resistor, with more cost-effective components. One possibility is to recalibrate a shunt resistor again and again over the service life of the battery sensor.
However, it has been found that continuous recalibration even while simultaneously measuring the high and temporally greatly variable currents occurring in the motor vehicle is difficult under the prevailing boundary conditions, in particular a desired low power consumption of the sensor, since the calibration current to be applied for calibration is intended to be selected to be small and is intended to be applied only briefly.