Wednesday, August 3, 2011

DIY Solar Controller Tell All


Not much blog activity lately. Plenty of great projects and hacks going on but I don't seem to have the time to write about it at the end of the day.

I plan to do a series of posts that breakdown the current solar controller and discuss each section. If you're still reading this then maybe how a solar controller works might be something you'd like to know about. Stay tuned. Every post will be detailed info about each section.

Here's the current schematic in it's entirety. Click on it to see it in full resolution.

The major improvement on this version (PCB Gerber files sent for fabrication yesterday) is that instead of a cut-out type panel regulator circuit; it has a short type panel regulator design. Thanks to crowd sourcing my engineering problems on the forums I tangentially got a tip on how to change the design to be a short type fairly easily. I'd been thinking about short type for a while but for some reason kept thinking I'd need to also switch the high-side on the panel, and that it'd be a lot of engineering work to get sorted out.

The short type is way better for a multitude of reasons. For one you're not making a big radio transmission system out of your panel transmission wires by switching the current on and off at high frequency (well 5Khz which is pretty low frequency really but still...). The next big gain is that you can use a N-Channel MOSFET (N-FET) instead of a P-Channel which is cheaper and way more efficient. Lastly it's less parts as the NPN BJT 2N2222 transistor and related resistor goes away. So it's all good in the neighborhood.

So stay tuned for the posts about each section of the controller.


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