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Registered Member #103
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:16PM
Location: Derby, UK
Posts: 845
This is something I've been wanting to do for ages...so this weekend I've finally motivated myself to get on with it
Outside on the garage roof I have a 50W panel, that has sat disconnected for the last year or so. It's intended for a 12v system, so open circuit voltage is about 19-20v in good sunlight. I also have 3x86Ah Yuasa batteries, that have also sat around doing nothng except the occasional recharge. When I first bought the panel, I also bought a cheap solar charge controller, which turned out to have simple 'bang-bang' type control, around about 14.4v. With 20m of cable going to the panel, the bang-bang could be heard very well on any radio! Adding some filtering helped with this, but I finally wrecked the controller by trying to change the float voltage from 14.4v to 13.65v (it has about 7 pots inside and I lost track of them all).
Anyway, to the point... here's what I will hopefully be replacing it with soon. It's a different topology, instead of switching the panel into the batteries, the panel is directly connected to the battery (through a diode!) and a buck converter puts a continuous current into a dumpload, which can be some distance away from the battery bank without causing RFI. A feedback loop controls the duty cycle of the buck converter, to hold the battery voltage at a constant 13.35v (eventually going to add an option to boost this temporarily to 14.4v). Some of you might have spotted that the buck converter will not put a continuous load on the battery bank...but hopefully this won't be a problem because the controller will be located right next to the battery bank, and the voltage divider is well filtered for the ADC. 7 segment just displays the battery voltage, it's sort of 'time multiplexed' from a single BCD to 7 seg converter to save IO pins.
Anyway it's powered by an ATiny24v, finishing the software is the next task. I haven't drawn a schematic, I just designed it directly onto the stripboard
I've written too much so I'm gonna shut up and post the pics...
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solar dumpload controller
