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 I was happy to report that I managed to get the USB interface to work. This interface has since proved to be extremely valuable in software development and testing. While the device is taking measurements you can look at the results (or intermediate results) at your PC in real time. You can even log large amounts of data to a .csv file and inspect the results in Excel.
Last time I went through the design of my new standalone anemometer. Now it’s time to build this thing and see if it works as planned.
After I fried a couple of chips on my driver circuit testing board due to a wrong chip in the power supply I was a bit more careful this time and built up the board step by step.
Last time I outlined my reasons to ‘go digital’ by adding a powerful on-board microcontroller and designing a standalone wind meter.
In the weeks that followed that decision I tried to find a suitable microcontroller and to design a prototype. Today I’ll show you the result of that work.
Finished 5V to 12V USB boost converter I frequently need a low-power supply to run a microcontroller system. Typically, one uses a lab power for such purposes. But at least on the desk where I do the programming I don’t have one. Since these systems typically consume little current it would be handy to be able to power them from USB. Most of my devices have on-board regulators so the voltage is rather uncritical. For 3.3 volt devices, the 5V from USB is just right. But others have a 5V regulator so they need a higher supply voltage. And even others might even need 12 volts.
