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It’s been a while since I posted anything related to my MPPT Solar Charger project. That doesn’t mean that no progress has been made…

Much like the beacon keyer presented here earlier, this RX/TX sequencer is a simple but useful little device. Its typical use is in ham radio applications when a separate power amplifier (PA) and/or a sensitive low-noise pre-amplifier (LNA) is used. Care has then to be take to safely transition between RX and TX states - and that’s where this sequencer comes in.

Around one and a half years ago I’ve designed and built various LED dimmers for both white and RGB LEDs. Then late last year someone approached me asking if I could make an RGB dimmer for him, too. But my designs were really tailored to their specific applications and built with home-made, i.e. milled PCBs which are time-consuming to make. So I decided to make a more universal version based on a proper, etched board which could be built in a small series and used for all kind of applications, both white and RGB. The result is this versatile, programmable 4-channel dimmer.

This is likely the first ham radio related project that I document here on this blog. But my very first PIC project was a beacon keyer that I made for my father, HB9BBD. That was was in 2013. A beacon keyer is a great project to get started with microcontrollers since it’s not much more than a fancy way of blinking an LED.

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.

Over the last year or so I’ve designed, built and tested a standalone solar charger. It performed quite well but as with any complex design there were a number of things that needed to be improved. So I eventually reached the point where I decided to design a revised version. And this is what this post is all about.

Have you ever tried to write a program that connects to some device via USB? I have done so a few years ago and was shocked how much of a pain that is (at least on a Windows plattform). I always thought there should be a nice little library that wraps all those uggly DLL imports, marshalling and COM API calls and offers a nice and clean C# interface to the outside world.

In my last post of this series I’ve looked at different transducers and finally decided on a entirely waterproof 14mm model. The much lower signal level from those kind of transducers makes it necessary to reduce the distance between the transducers in order to still receive a reasonable signal amplitude. So I took my previous lasercut design and reduced it in size so that the distance between the transducers is only 120mm. I went to the local FabLab and and lasered two copies of the downsized design.

In late 2014 and early 2015 I had posted a short series on an inductance meter project. The first post in that series described an Arduino shield that allowed an Arduino UNO to do inductance measurements and got this blog mentioned on dangerousprototypes.com for the very first time.

It’s been way too long since the last post in my Ultrasonic Anemometer series. But better late then never. So far I have always used the same type of transducers. When I started this project I looked around and found the Multicomp MCUSD16A40S12RO. They were comparatively cheap and readily available so I ordered some and used nothing else for the next two or so years.