Thursday, January 28, 2010

Panel must stay on even when the battery is dead

So a problem I realized I had a couple months ago is that I can turn the panel on by applying voltage to a electronic switch (N-Channel mosfet) using the microcontroller.  That's great for turning off the panel if the battery is getting overcharged.  The only problem is that if the battery is dead then my microcontroller is not on so I can't apply a voltage to turn the panel on to charge the battery. 

So I decided to try a P-Channel mosfet, these are always on and turn off when you apply voltage.  It turned out to be a little trickier than I originally thought since the voltage you use to turn if off has to be pretty close to the voltage level that you are controlling.  In my case I'm controlling the panel voltage which can be as high as 23 volts and using only 3-5 volts to control it.  So the 5 volts wasn't enough to fully turn the panel off.  The solution was to add another transistor and use the high level panel voltage to turn off the P-Channel mosfet.  Here's the schematic. 
The other exciting news is that my solar cells came in the mail today.  They're 4"x6" and put out 4 amps at .55 volts.  I plan to put together 6 of them, in a picture frame, to get an inexpensive 13 watt panel.  I'm thinking $46 total cost (5 watt panels cost about $40 at retail).  It's hard to find inexpensive small panels. 

The cells are really thin (see picture) and super fragile.  I'm hoping I can solder them up without breaking any.
That's all for now.

No comments:

Post a Comment