In this article we are going to give a short overview of mosfets and more specifically power mosfets. Surfing the web, we found this great YouTube video (Developed under Teaching Innovation Project 10-170 of Universidad de Granada in Spain) covering the basics of mosfets: Definition “The metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET, MOS-FET, or MOS FET) is […]
Investigating the Wind-turbine to dump load switching – part 2, going the PWM route
Investigating the Wind-turbine to dump load switching – part 1
The (most obvious?) switching solution would be a high-power relay. In a previous article, we already did an experiment with a Solid State relay (and we will continue to do so). Now we will look further into the ‘contactor’. The ‘kit’ we ordered from www.iacs.co.uk (via Ebay) is a relay board with optical isolation (to […]
ADC driver for the energy harvester
Introduction One of the goals of iteration 1 of the energy harvester project is to extend our software platform with drivers for measuring (gpio in, adc), controlling (gpio out, pwm) and debugging (uart). In this article our focus is set on the ADC driver (we already introduced the Analog-to-Digital-Converter here). It is hard (not to say […]
AC generation experiments
Power with green inspiration. A couple of weeks ago, an electricity blackout in our neighborhood was announced by the power company. We thought this was the ideal time for some experimentation with ‘green’ off-the-shelve products and also explain a bit about the inspiration for the energy harvester project. The various “domain knowledge gathering” experiments (e.g. […]
Driving LEDs by GPIO: finally resolved!
Development facilitators
This might be a good time to talk about developer (or technical development procedure) facilitators. Although these are not even regarded as intermediate requirements – and certainly are not considered to be as important as user requirements – some development facilitators could be considered as development procedure requirements that have big impact on the process […]
The relay
Introduction A relay – in this context – is an electronic switch and can be controlled by micro-controller logic. There are different types of relays, with different pin configurations. A 4-pin relay can be OFF (not conducting current) or ON (conducting current): 2 pins are powering and thus controlling the relay and the other 2 […]
Some basic hands-on experience with a dump load
Introduction The dump load (already introduced here) is used to burn the excess energy of our battery charger. The excess is typically generated by the wind turbine in windy conditions. In contrast with solar energy, the battery charger must accept wind energy in order to protect the wind turbine. For that reason the dump load […]
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