Solar Fountain

Alright, here's my first blog. This project's been going on for quite a while so I'll catch you up. I'm making a solar powered garden fountain. Not a small one but one that moves a lot of water say, 500 gallons per hour (like your garden hose turned half way up). The fountain is just the first of many projects that are intended to allow people to make use of low cost solar power that they generate in their backyard.

The bigger picture is this: you can spend $15K and up to put a grid tied solar array on your roof, which is great, but that's a lot of cash to put down. If you don't have that kind of money then you can buy solar powered walkway lights and other really small scale stuff like that. Those are great too but they don't really light much. So my thinking is that there needs to be an alternative that sits in the middle of those two tiers. One that costs from a couple hundred to a thousand dollars.

I bought a system at Harbor Frieght for $200 dollars, I added a marine/RV battery from Walmart ($65) and I have more 12 volt power that I've found a use for. So I intend to build devices that allow people to make use of that power in their homes. The garden and garages are first, then the home power. Most devices in your home run on low voltage DC power. They convert the high voltage AC power from the grid to DC. So there's plenty of opportunity to make use of the 12 volt power in your battery that was created by the sun.

More on the AC vs DC and grid power later. Now back to the solar fountain controller project. Here's a couple of videos I made a while back showing the first experiments. A little more back story... I have a natural spring in my back yard, it showed up about a year and a half ago. So the solar power stuff started out of necessity for moving that water out of my yard. The first experiments used grid power. I didn't want to add another device that used grid power 24/7 and continually cost me money.



Here's a link to a video with the early electronics that controlled the pump and storage tank.

Early electronics video on Youtube

Here's the first solar power test video, on Youtube

So fast forward from that first test to the fountain controller project, which runs a pump on only one panel. I spent a lot of time with an electrical engineering text book over the past year, as well as tons of great online sources. I designed a circuit board, of which I got the first prototype made in China and back in the mail on Thursday, (thanks Sparkfun and BatchPCB!). Here's those:

Here's my daughter soldering the first board, (my first sweatshop, all those years of parenting are starting to payoff).

Here the case and the semi-populated board.

So that's where I'm at right now. Tomorrow I'll put some code on the microcontroller and see if I can get the LED to blink!