ND2E

Ham Radio-When All Else Fails.

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Charging the battery

Friday, December 09 2011 15:34
On cloudy, rainy, or just dull days, the PV array will not provide enough juice to charge the battery that I ran down during the prior evening's QSOs. No sun, no charge. Somehow I should have expected that. To overcome the solar lack I need to apply an AC powered charger to the battery. Earlier, when using the 7 AH battery, I just floated the battery across the Kenwood 25 amp switcher and figured it would charge. That is pretty much right but if I forgot the battery and left it on the power bus for a more than a day, I expect that it may have been overcharged. Since the 7AH battery died an early death I was loath to do the same with a much more expensive battery.
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15 Watt PV Array

Saturday, November 26 2011 20:42

I hung the 15 Watt PV today... Like its brother, it is on the side of the deck with almost no elevation angle.  I also hung a 1.5 Watt solar maintainer that I am using with the solar hot water controller. It is also mounted on the south side with no elevation angle because I don't want it looking at the sky. I want it to be responsive to general illumination not incident light. I may have to put a diffuser over it if it is doesn't do what I expect.pv-aray

Yesterday I put the battery on the 500 mA charger to bring it up to full charge. After almost 24 hours it was effectively at full charge but the charger had not changed over to its float mode because it just hadn't reached the crossover voltage.

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PIC-EL 3

Sunday, November 13 2011 17:21
Finally got back to working on the solar hot water home heating controller. I am using the Pic-EL as my test bed to work out the final solution to my friend's solar controller. Many months ago I finished assembling the Pic-El 3 and started learning MPASM the assembler for the PIC controllers. It has only been 30 years since I played in assembly language and then it was IBM Basic Assembler not any of the more recent microprocessors like the 6501 0r 6800. I missed that entire generation. So my first outing was to copy the LED flasher program from Peatman's "Design with PIC Microcontrollers." I got everything typed in and started looking for why I was seeing several assembler messages, warnings, and why it failed to assemble. After several hours of inspection spread over several months I finally have it assembled, and downloaded the code to the PIC-EL. The new task is to understand what is going on and how to use the banks and I/O pins for the controller. I have done a state diagram for what I think I want and will try coding it as soon as I better understand the PIC I/O, timer, and comparator structures.
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Solar Power Update

Thursday, November 24 2011 19:45

After several rainy, cloudy days the solar battery system is down to 12 volts. The PV panel is not providing enough juice on cloudy days to recharge the battery. Of course I have been using the radio a lot to try and prove out the system. In the past week I have made 30+ contacts on PSK and JT65 so the battery has been well exercised.

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More Solar

Sunday, November 13 2011 17:07

I have had the solar system running since Saturday of last week. There have been several sunny days to charge the battery. It actually came up to full charge one day but then I took the external charger off. The solar charger did not have enough steam to fully charge the battery although it came up to 13.2 volts, I now have a 1 amp charger on the battery and will see if it is the charger or the battery that is weak.

 
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