Well, I’ve been tossing up how to control the mains charger for a while now.
When I first started the project, my thinking was to use an old Xantrex charger we had kicking around, and just electrically disconnect it from the batteries when we wanted to use the solar power. I designed a 4-layer PCB which sported a ATTiny24A microcontroller, MOSFETs (which I messed up) and some LEDs.
This was going to be a combined fan controller and power management unit. It had the ability (theoretically) to choose a supply based on the input voltage, and to switch if needed between supplies.
It didn’t work out, the charger got really confused by the behaviour of the controller. I was looking to re-instate it using the Redarc solar controller, but I never got there. In the end, it was found that the Redarc controller had problems switching sources and would do nothing whilst the batteries went flat.
We’ve now replaced both ends of the system. The solar controller is a Powertech MP3735 and integrates over-discharge protection. The mains charger is now a MeanWell HEP-600C-12 (which has not missed a beat since the day it was put in).
Unlike my earlier set-up, this actually has a 5V logic signal to disable it, and my earlier controller could theoretically generate that directly.
Looking at the PCB of my earlier power controller attempt, it looks like this could still work.
Above is the PCB artwork. I’ve coloured in the sections and faded out the parts I can omit.
In green up the top-left we have the mains control/monitoring circuitry. We no longer see the mains voltage, so no point in monitoring it, so we can drop the resistor divider that fed the ADC. This also means we no longer need the input socket P2.
Q2 and Q7 were the footprints of the two P-channel MOSFETs. We don’t need the MOSFETs themselves, but the signals we need can be found on pin 1 of Q2. This is actually the open-drain output of Q1, which we may be able to hook directly to the REMOTE+ pin on the charger. A pull-up between there and the charger’s 5V rail, and we should be in business.
In yellow, bottom left is the solar monitoring interface. This is still useful, but we won’t be connecting solar to the battery ourselves, so we just keep the monitoring parts. The LED can stay as an indicator to show when solar is “good enough”.
In purple, occupying most of the board, is the controller itself. It stays for obvious reasons.
In red, is the fan control circuitry. No reason why this can’t stay.
In blue is the circuitry for monitoring the battery voltage. Again, this stays.
The main advantage of doing this is I already have the boards, and a number of microcontrollers already present. There’s a board with all except the big MOSFETs populated: with the MOSFETs replaced by 3-pin KK sockets.
How would the logic work? Much the same as the analogue version I was pondering.
- If battery voltage is low, OR, the sun has set, enable the mains charger.
What concerned me about an analogue solution was what would happen once the charger got to the constant-voltage stage. We want to give it a bit of time to keep the battery topped up. Thus it makes sense to shut down the charger after a fixed delay.
This is easy to do in a microcontroller. Not hard with analogue electronics either, it’s fundamentally just a one-shot, but doing it with an MCU is a single-chip solution. I can make the delay as long as I like. So likely once the battery is “up to voltage”, I can let it float there for an hour, or until sunrise if it’s at night.
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