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HiTech's avatar
HiTech
Explorer
Jun 06, 2013

Home brew Arduino MPPT controller

Pretty cool project. Highly programmable. He does not list the amps it is capable of but I'm thinking 4-8 only based on the diode sizing.

There are some very sophisticated MPPT algorithms out there, but it seems like a lot of the typical commercial units use pretty simplistic hill climbimg logic or even simple closed loop circuits (bad for multiple peak voltage systems like you might get with a panel in the shade and another in the sun) or a 76% of Voc fixed ratio where the panels are taken off line to measure Voc and then voltage is just nailed to 76% of Voc (not horribly far off on average for a single panel, but IFF that panel is around 80% Voc for Mpp under most conditions).

The fancier code is used in solar race cars and more advanced systems and includes fuzzy logic, neural nets and more.

A platform like this would enable trying out lots of approaches.

MPPT Project

Jim

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