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How to build a hybrid solar/wind energy harvester?

Green4 charge controller: wiring diagrams part 2

Wiring diagram: wind turbine to dump load In contrast to solar panels, a wind turbine can’t be disconnected in case it generates too much power. We need to brake it by attaching a load to it. However, wind power can’t always flow through the charge controller: high volts and/or amps might damage the internal circuitry […]

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Green4 charge controller: wiring diagrams part 1

Introduction Instead of endlessly listing requirements and specifications, we prefer to demonstrate the architecture of our Green4 charge controller by means of wiring diagrams and other illustrations. The Green4 is designed to be a versatile device that enables you to evaluate different charge controller architectures. Call it a charge controller emulator. There are several reasons […]

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Coming Soon

Finally, we are almost there. Our first product – a joint development result of cooperation between IACS and RTOS.BE – is about to be commercialized. The Energy2Switch is a DC switch board with 2 channels rated up to 50V and 40A. Continuous power is limited at 1500W per channel, which boils down to 40A @ […]

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Charge controller high-side / low-side wiring diagrams – part 1

Introduction After exploring the relay solution space (read part1, part2 and part3), we decided to actually change the boundary of the system and move the relay outside of the energy harvester. Main reason is flexibility and scalability: one could choose a more optimal relay in terms of cost and power spec depending on the (maximum) […]

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The energy harvester is ready for iteration 3

Iteration 2 overview Wind power to dump load switching has been the main topic of iteration 2. In our system design we also call this Power Management Decision 1 (PMD1). PMD1 should realize several system requirements and, because we have an energy harvester model in Enterprise Architect, this list of requirements can easily be generated […]

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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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Charge controller system architecture

Documenting architectures Architectures are documented by views, and so that is how we proceed too. The goal of a view is to describe the system from the viewpoint of its stakeholders. Several architectural view models exist and probably the most famous one is the 4+1 model of Kruchten (see here). For the energy harvester we […]

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From stakeholder to system requirements

System requirements and their organization Given our stakeholder requirements and some basic domain knowledge, we can now initiate the system requirements. Instead of extending the rather informal and unstructured stakeholder requirements, we prefer to start with a brand new set of requirements which is organized in a hierarchical structure (divide and conquer!) in which: the […]

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Stakeholder requirements

Introduction End-users, developers, testers, production, project managers, business, sales… they all have their interest in the system and are called stakeholders. At first, it is the task of the system architect to collect those interests (or concerns as recent literature suggests [ref]) and to resolve (potential) conflicts. Communication is key since stakeholders do not necessarily […]

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Our at-first-sight trivial product: a hybrid solar/wind energy harvester (aka battery charger)

As long as we are going to build something, it should be awesome, hip and cool. It would have something to do with renewable energy for example. Yes, we are going green, because green is cool! Bugger if it already exists! As this is for demonstration purposes only, we don’t care. We appreciate the free […]

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