Over the last few weeks I have been quite busy with my MPPT Solar Charger project. I’ve built up a first board and started writing firmware for it. Since the last version was not too different in terms of hardware I was able to re-use most of that code. But I hadn’t even touched on the whole USB stuff back then so there was still a lot of work to do. While the project is still far from being complete I am happy to say that I’ve made quite some progress. Most importantly, the new design seems to work well and so far I haven’t found any mistakes in the board layout. But let’s go through this step by step.

USB

I regularly find USB communication to be the most complex and obscure part of the firmware. That’s why I like to get that working first and then add all the other functionality later. I’ve started with some sample code that Microchip provides for their PIC1846J50 family of chips. That way I was able to get the my board act as a composite HID (Human Interface Device) / MSD (Mass Storage Device) quite quickly. Of course, that demo application doesn’t do anything particularly useful but it provides a solid basis for adding the functionality you need.

At least for the HID I’ve implemented most of that functionality. I can read all the relevant data such as settings, currents, temperatures, voltages and so on over USB. I can also control all the outputs as well as the actual solar charger remotely. More on that later.

On the MSD side there is still lots to be done. The solar charger successfully enumerates as a USB flash drive and you can read and write data from and to it. But that’s really it. The charger doesn’t care about the files you save there and also doesn’t put any data there.

Flash and EEPROM

This brings us to the next topic: Non-volatile memory. There is both a I2C EEPROM as well as a SPI flash on the board. Communication with the EEPROM is fully implemented but currently its only used to save the time and date. The idea is to save all the settings and calibrations on the EEPROM. That shouldn’t be difficult but I haven’t had time for that yet.

The flash also works just as it is supposed to but the chip I chose turned out to be a bad design choice. It can’t do page erase, only entire 16k sectors can be ereased. That makes it difficult to use since you have to temporarily save the sector’s data somewhere when you want to change only part of a sector. We don’t have that much RAM so we have to save that data to flash itself. That can all be done but it’s just a hassle. Apart from that a sector erease takes time. A loooot of time. So I’ll just juse a different chip when I do the next iteration of the board. For now I’ll just use the first 512bytes of each sector. That’s extremely wasteful but will do for now I guess.

Solar Charger

The actual charger circuit hasn’t changed much since the last version so I expected little trouble in getting it to work. However, I managed to confuse the low and high gate pins in firmware and only found that bug days later when I had already done plenty of damage to the board. By the time I found and fixed the problem I had already killed the input current sensor, the ADC, as well as some of the PIC’s output drivers.

So I built up a second board but only with the components required to test the buck. And much to my relief it works. And it works well. I haven’t done any precise measurements yet but it seems at least as efficient as the last version. I had it running at its rated power of 75 without it getting overly hot. As expected, most power dissipation takes place in the coil so the coil did get quite warm but not hot. The FETs heat up a bit due to their proximity to the coil but otherwise don’t care much. My main problem with these tests was to somehow sink the power at the output without overcharging the battery. My home-made dummy load can sink up to 4.5 amps but not for very long before it regulates down to avoid overheating. I had the charger running at around 40 watts for several hours and it only got modestly warm.

Also, the wave forms on the scope look nice and clean. There’s considerably less ringing and overshoot than with the last version. So the improved layout seems to work well. During the tests so far I have turned the charger on and off at least a hundred times, switched from asynchronous to synchronous mode and vice versa and had it running for about 10 hours. I also pushed it all the way up to about 85 watts where the coil starts saturating and the caps have to handle more ripple than they are rated for. I’m happy to report that during all these tests I haven’t killed a single fet nor any other component (once the firmware was ok). I am confident that it will stay this way.

Synchronous bucks are somewhat dangerous in the sense that it is easy to short the input or output to ground when you’re not careful. My solution to this is having rigorously tested functions for turn-on, turn-off, switching mode and changing duty cycle and then rely only on these functions when implementing different MPPT strategies. If these few functions do what they should you can get away with quite a bit of abuse without damaging anything.

What I also noticed during my tests is that the break-even between synchronous and asynchronous mode is somewhere in the region of 1 amp. That’s about twice what it was with the last version and is thanks to the extremely efficient diode that makes asynchronous mode much more efficient.

USB Charger and power outputs

This is something that has changed quite a bit since so I was eager to see how it performs. I haven’t done any detailed tests but I’m very pleased with it so far. It definitely performs better than the last version. In theory, you should be able to simultaneously pull 2 amps from each of the two USB charging ports. I haven’t done that yet but when fast-charging two cell phones (approximately 2 amps judging from the power it pulls from the battery) it stayed surprisingly cool – unlike the last version.

Also no surprise with the 4 power outputs. I had changed the mosfet drivers and mosfets in order to save board area. Apart from that everything works like before. I can still turn off the drivers when none of the outputs is in use in order to preserve power. All works as it should.

Solar Charger App

Of course, all the USB HID functionality is of little use without some software on the other side, i.e. running on a PC. I’ve spent a lot of  time writing my Solar Charger App over the past few weeks and I can say it’s getting pretty good. I has already proved very useful in testing the buck. Since I can monitor and control everything via USB there is no need to have a user interface sitting on top of the board during testing. That means unrestricted access for scope and multimeter probes. And since there’s so much more space on a PC screen than on the little LCD I can display all parameters simultaneously.

The program is written in C#, using my recently published HID utility and WPF .  I’ve tested it on Win7 and Win10 and runs absolutely stable. It also copes well with ultra high resolution displays where everything gets scaled-up in order to still be visible/readable. The screen shot above gives you some idea of its current functionality. Take the efficiency measurement with a grain of salt, though. The measurements are yet to be calibrated.

The code is available on github: github.com/soldernerd/SolarchargerApp. To compile it you need VisualStudio 2015 Community which is available free of charge.

Measurements

Measurements is another important topic. The newly chosen 16-bit ADC works well. Actually, I don’t feel much of a difference to the 18-bit version used previously. Anyway, the measurements are done with 14-bit precision only in order to speed them up.

 

The readings I get from the two current sensors are surprisingly accurate even without having done any calibration so far. So for now, all measurements have been done with their theoretical (i.e. calculated) multipliers and offsets.

The temperature measurements are done by the PIC directly, using a 2.5V external voltage reference. Both the temperature sensors (one on-board, up to two externally) as well as the voltage reference perform just like they should but I get a lot of noise in my otherwise reasonable measurements. This is quite certainly a software issue. I might not give the PIC’s internal ADC enough time to settle after switching channels or something like that. I’m sure it can and will be solved but I haven’t given this very high priority so far.

Next steps

A lot of work remains to be done. One of the next things I will do is to implement proper calibration for the voltage and current measurements. At the moment, all the relevant constants are hard-coded so I first need to change them being variables, store them in EEPROM and retrieve them from there at startup. In a second step I need to make them accessible over USB. Once that’s done it should be possible to calibrate them in a fully automated fashion. I’ve never done that so far but my multimeter as well as my power supplies can be controlled via USB (or GPIB, respectively).  So I want to write a calibration routine that sweeps the device under test, calculates the proper calibration values and sends them to the solar charger.

Getting the Mass Storage Device working from FLASH is another big thing to do. As reported, the currently 7kb of memory on the flash drive are mapped into the PIC’s internal flash memory. I’ll have to dive quite deep into the Microchip USB code in order to figure out how to change that. I expect to spend a significant amount of time until that works but there’s no way around it in the long run.

Once mass storage works properly I can also start implementing settings as a configuration file on the flash drive. So as an alternative to doing things via HID which requires dedicated software to run on the PC you can also check and change settings by editing a text file residing on the flash drive. The next step will then be to also write measured data to that storage.

Then most of the low-power features are still to be implemented. The most basic stuff is there: The 5V buck for USB charging is turned off when not in use and so are the mosfet drivers for the power outputs and the solar charger. The user interface is also turned off after a certain time of inactivity. But the PIC constantly runs at 48MHz, the USB module is never turned off even when not in use, it never goes into any of the several low-power modes and so on. So at the moment it consumes around 10mA with the display off and 16mA with the display on.

And yes, there’s also more testing to be done on a lot of aspects. The code could definitely use a clean-up once I’m done with it, I also have plans of adding a boot-loader so users can update the firmware via USB… I won’t run out of work any time soon.

The firmware is on github, too: github.com/soldernerd/SolarChargerRevC_Software. It is updated much more frequently than I do posts here so if you’re interested I suggest you track the most recent development there.

The next post on this topic is here.