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How to build a hybrid solar/wind energy harvester?

Archives for September 2013

Charging a deep-cycle battery via low-side mosfet switching: the hard way

Introduction The core of our charge controller (PMD2) is essentially two switchable mosfet channels: one channel to load a battery (bank) and another channel to divert abundant energy to a dump load. Both channels can be switched on/off by software controlled PWM, and by configuring different PWM duty cycle ratios, we should be able: to […]

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Building a wind-turbine simulator

One of the challenges involved in designing and developing the ‘energy harvester‘, is to work out how to design, prototype, test and evaluate software algorithms for managing power flow in the system. At first, we can use powerful lab power supplies: We have lab supplies capable of 900W, 1500W and 3000W DC power output. These […]

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How we work: one year retrospective

Introduction We started the energy harverster project about a year ago and we thought it might be interesting to our readers to explain how we work and how we get the job done. Of course, bringing the technical challenge to a good end is important but only part of our mission, which is to: demonstrate […]

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Charge controller high-side / low-side wiring diagrams – part 2

Connection scheme for low-side switching In comparison to the high-side wiring diagram we saw in part 1, the connections for low-side switching are the other way around: all ‘+’-s are connected (instead of all ‘-‘-s), and the (power) switching devices are ‘below’ the loads (instead of ‘above’). In order to better explain this diagram, we need […]

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