Battery charge controller software

If your solar system's volts were 12 and your amps were 14, you would need a charge controller that had at least 14 amps. This brings the minimum amps that this charger controller must have to In this example, you would need a 12 volt, 20 amp charge controller.

Exclusions may apply See Details. Charge Controllers Solar charge controllers regulate incoming solar power to maintain batteries and prevent overcharging. Add to Cart. Choose Options. On Sale. In addition, you have the Load Control, where you can manually turn the power output from the charge controller on and off.

In the lower section, you have some statistics and charts available. The charts are incremented as long as the monitoring is active, and you might want to clear the charts once in a while. You can do so by right-clicking on the chart, then select Clear.

In the left column, you have some key numbers of how much power your solar setup has generated; daily, monthly, annual, and in total. You also have the same numbers for power consumption through the controller load. The voltage chart shows the voltage development over time for both the solar panel, the battery, and the load.

For some unknown reason, the battery curve does not show up in our setup. The current chart shows the Amperage curves for the solar panel, the battery the current going from the controller and into the battery , and the load. The power chart is the most useful, in our opinion. It shows the wattage development for the solar panel and the load. Here, you get an impression of how well your solar panel setup is performing. In our setup, we use a W panel, but it's rear to have the wattage above W.

I increased the width of the board traces that handle high current. The IPC nomograph shows that I need at least 4mm wide traces. The smallest power traces on my board are over 5mm wide. I used a schottky diode in earlier versions of the design to "Or-Tie" the battery to the load.

The 0. A reflow oven or hot air rework station works best but if you can handle a soldering iron, you can assemble this board. I hand soldered the first board and used my DIY reflow oven for the second with solder paste applied by syringe. For the third board, I used the stencil shown below to apply the paste. This gave the best results with zero rework needed.

The digital latch for turning the 5 volt Raspberry Pi and 10 volt Video Converter regulators on and off is on the Max board. The set and reset inputs to the latch are active low. Pushing the "On" button on the keyboard sends a low to the "Set" input of the latch.

The "Q" output is latched high and buffered with an inverter to drive the buck regulator enable pins low. When the Teensy receives a shut down signal from the Pi, it drives the "Reset" input of the latch low thru an inverter , causing the enable signal to the buck regulators to go high. The Pi could be wired directly to the latch but I put the Teensy in the middle so it can shut down the laptop even if the Pi is locked up. The Teensy can also provide a delay before turning off power, if necessary.

The latch circuit must operate when the laptop is off so it is powered by a separate 3. With the laptop turned off, the battery load includes the quiescent current for the 3. These loads draw ua worst case ua measured. All together, a fully charged 58 watt hour battery would be depleted in days if the laptop is not plugged in. The test procedure for the Max battery charger board is available at my Github repo.

For additional information on SMBus communication, battery fuel gauge display, and general laptop repurposing, visit my Instructable titled " Battery Powered Raspberry Pi in Repurposed Laptop " and video. I hope you find this Hackster project useful for making a portable Raspberry Pi laptop. I will make updates as I learn more and invite you to add questions, comments, or corrections below. I have designed a second laptop battery charger board see below that uses an MP or MP and doesn't need an ATtiny microcontroller.

The details are given in my Hackaday. IO project. Log in Sign up. Laptop Battery Charge Controller. Frank Adams. Advanced Full instructions provided Over 1 day 1, Things used in this project. Buy from Newark Buy from www. Arduino code for ATtiny85 controlling Max with 3 series battery. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. Maximum battery charge current is set at 1 amp. Battery Pack has 3 series cells, each cell fully charged at 4.