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How to build a hybrid solar/wind energy harvester?

Archives for October 2013

High-side mosfet board: an elance experience

Introduction A few months ago – as a prototyping experiment – we decided to develop two types of high-power switching boards: one for high-side switching and another one for low-side switching. Goal was to gain some experience on different switching techniques for charge controllers. We contacted several hardware development / prototyping companies and, at the […]

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Filtering sensor data

The ADC is a much used peripheral in embedded systems. This is not different in our project. We extensively use it to read out – for example – voltage and amperage data. Many people are still unaware of the fact that it is still just sampling: One gets a digital value which is the result […]

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Hardware-Software partitioning

Embedded Systems have reached such a complexity that it has become impossible to design them “from scratch”. That above statement [Seminar “Embedded Systems”, Hardware/Software Partitioning, Frederick Dufour – 2006, July 3rd] is maybe the proverbial bridge too far. Since every problem can be decomposed into smaller problems, it IS possible to design a system from […]

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I²C and SPI

The I²C bus The I²C bus is a multi-node bus. Nodes can have – at a given time – either a master or a slave role. On the one hand, a master node generates the clock and initiates communication with slaves. On the other hand, a slave node receives the clock and responds when addressed […]

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Battery charging with the Wind-turbine simulator

In order to charge batteries with the wind turbine simulator, the setup already becomes quite elaborate. First, there is the brushed DC motor which drives the axial flux turbine. It has a 24V, 350W and maximum 19A rating. The DC motor drives the generator with a chain gear to step down the high RPM of […]

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