Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Solar panel controler (with buckboost charger) by Tim Nolan

A very nice fellow - Tim Nolan has put a lot of effort in this project and I really like the documentation.

+ Its pretty cheap ~ 50 eur (thats 1/2 price of most 100watt solar-panel controlers with very limited functionality).
+ I control the charging of lead-acid batteries with solar-panels.
+ It have serial output (usb-serial) for data-logging
+ I have a buck-boost functionality (thats nice, read more on Tims homepage)
+ No micro-components.


- Pretty hardcore code (Its advanced code for an advanced controller).
- I have not been able to find some of the core components in EU, so either someone can "translate" components to EU or I would have to order components  from the US.
- No desciption on how to scale project to bigger solar-panels (eg. 250 watt).

Green + Arduino = Greenduino

There is small Greenduino seeds everywhere, but no central place to go.
This blog is an attempt to collect material, links, projects with the common dominator:
  • Its for a green purpose - helping with solar, wind, ecological agriculture aso. 
  • It built on the Arduino platform. 
There is many other platforms (picaxe, parallax....) with green electronic solutions but the trouble of learning a new coding language and trawling through another bloated forum can make the simplest problem enormous - therefor I have decided that "There can be only one" - the Arduino. Its more expensive than some other pics, but benefit of having only one platform out-ways 3 Eur saved. It have a huge community. Its open hardware and so on..   

I will try to find project for:

  • Solar power - electricity
  • Solar power - heat
  • Wind power - small DC
  • Energy monitoring - watts, temperature, humidity...
  • Water-pumping - and other small automatism