Charge controller project

From Organic Design wiki
Revision as of 13:31, 21 May 2013 by Nad (talk | contribs) (Voltage and current measurement)

I'm building a solar MPPT charge controller using a Raspberry Pi based on this Arduino-based project. The system consists of the following main parts.

Voltage and current measurement

We need to have real-time voltage and current sensing of the solar array to determine the optimal voltage and current to draw from it that delivers the maximum power (the maximum power point tracking, MPPT). And we need to also measure the voltage of the battery to know what kind of charging requirements it has, and finally the current on the load needs to be monitored so that we can graph our power usage over time.

The voltage measurement simply involves a very low current potential divider to ground set such that the maximum voltage the divided point can have is not higher than the maximum input of the system's ADC's.

Current measurement is a little more complicated and involves a shunt resistor (very low value with high precision) placed in the circuit requiring measurement, then taking the voltage measurement across this shunt resister and using ohms law to calculate the current. Since the shunt resistor's value is so low (to ensure minimal voltage drop) the voltage across it needs to be amplified using a current-sense amplifier chip which is basically an op-amp designed for single ended configuration rather than requiring a feedback system. See this current-sensing tutorial for more detail.

One issue with this is that there isn't any analogue inputs on the Pi, but that can be done with a single chip solution such as the MCP3008 which gives eight analogue channels and connects directly into the SPI port. See Analogue Inputs for Raspberry Pi Using the MCP3008 for more details.

MPPT algorithm

PWM DC-DC converter

Three-stage battery charger

Web-based interface

See also