This will be my shortest post ever. But I just spotted a project on indiegogo.com that I think is worth mentioning: A small and affordable tool to do reflow soldering. It’s basically a heating plate specifically designed for reflow soldering. So it can reproduce JEDEC temperature profiles, it does data logging and and you can even control it via a web interface if you spend an extra 9$ on the wifi upgrade.
It’s time to follow up on the MPPT Solar Charger project. Progress has been slow since I’m currently working full time and doing a master’s degree at the same time. Given that this blog has previously been something close to a 50% job at times things will necessarily slow down a bit. But all the projects, including this one and the ultrasonic anemometer are alive and well and I’m working on them whenever I find some time.
As you may have noticed I’m quite busy working on the MPPT Solar Charger project. The latest version uses a 4 lines x 20 characters LCD that connects via I2C as well as a rotary encoder with a push button.
In a previous post I have presented a design for an MPPT Solar Charger. In the mean time I have built a prototype and also wrote some software for it. So today I’ll go through my findings of what works well and what needs to be improved. And yes, there are some flaws in the design…
I last time proudly presented the new RevB board and got a lot of feedback from people who want one, too. As mentioned I have all the components here to ship up to 10 kits but I was reluctant to send anything until I had the chance to do some hardware testing. Not much had changed since the last revision but I don’t like taking chances on things like this.
Good news: the boards from dirtypcbs.com have arrived and look great. I also got all the components for the 11 boards. Why 11? I ordered about 10 (they call it a protopack) and was lucky enough to get 11. Thats dirtypcbs.
I’m currently waiting for the boards for my Ultrasonic Anemometer Rev B to arrive from Hong Kong and this gives me some time to write about the MPPT Solar Charger design that I did quite some time ago. I published a series of posts on a Arduino MPPT Solar Charger Shield and got a lot of encouraging feedback. But that shield was more of a proof-of-concept than a finished product. While it generally performed well it drew way too much current when idle to actually be deployed unless you can count on plenty of sunshine every day.
I recently ordered my first PCB at dirtypcbs.com and the result was promising. So there was nothing stopping me from finalizing the Rev B of my standalone Ultrasonic Anemometer and ordering a protopack. I’ve placed the order a few days ago and expect the boards to arrive here in 2 to 3 weeks. This should be good news for all those of you who have been asking for kits and want to contribute to the further developement of this project. I’ll build up one or two boards as soon as they get here and do some testing. If everything works as planned I can order some more components and ship some kits soon after that.
While most of my microcontroller designs run on 3.3 volts there is still the ocasional 5 volt design. Or I do something with an Arduino. So the need may arise to interface between logic working at different voltage levels. There are several ways of doing this, depending on your needs. Things are relatively simple as long as you know in advance which side is transmitting and which side is receiving. It gets more difficult if the communication is bi-directional or with busses such as I2C that are bi-directional by nature. I did a search on farnell.com and identified two chips that can translate between almost any two voltage levels bi-directionally. The Texas Instruments TXB0106 works with up to 6 CMOS (i.e. actively driven high or low) signals for protocols such as SPI. The PCA9306 (also from TI) is intended for protocols such as I2C that rely on pull-up resistors and where a line must never be actively driven high.
It’s been a long six weeks since my last post but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t done anything since. Among other things, I wrote some code to get the I2C interface working and hooked the anemometer up to an Arduino Uno with an LCD display attached. Apart from demonstrating the I2C interface this also nice for testing. For the first time I can see what this thing is measuring in real time without hooking it up to a PC over USB.
