Raspberry Pi 3 Solar Charge Controller

Building a solar powered pi is a surprisingly easy task.

Raspberry pi 3 solar charge controller.

Kaspars picked up a lightweight 18 v 5 a solar panel that was marketed as being perfect for charging boats and cars. Sunair connected to an arduino use cases. The battery is a 12v 1 3 amphour battery the length of time the battery last very much depends on what you are doing with. Solar power charger for your phone or battery pack.

This tutorial demonstrates how to use serial communication on a raspberry pi to connect to an mppt solar charge controller and transmit the photo voltaic data via a python web server rest api to web enabled devices. I was able to make the raspberry pi communicate with the charge controller using the pymodbus library and a cheap usb to rs485 adapter. The charge controller must be able to control the solar panel voltage so it can keep the voltage at the point where you can get 100 of the available power out. And it ties up an entire laptop which must be kept powered on and within bluetooth range of the solar board.

Here s a breakdown of how we ll do it. The epsolar tracer2210a charge controller including their bn range has an rj45 port which can be used to connect an optional monitor or to windows monitoring software. 3d print your own sunair solar tracker. Getting started with the raspberry pi set up your raspberry pi and explore what it can do.

Raspberry pi solar serial rest api tutorial rdagger march 26 2017. I used one of these usb to rs485 adapters. You can monitor the voltage of a bare li po battery with the switchdoc labs sunairplus charge controller or the adafruit ina219 volt current meter combined with their solar charger and power boost with a usb port. Victron has software or more accurately firmware that emulates their color control gx venus gx monitoring devices and it runs on a raspberry pi.

Raspberry pi and arduino sunair connected to a raspberry pi. The voltage for typical li po batteries is 4 2v when full and 3 7v when nearly empty so you ll want to shut down your pi board. The lt8490 can also detect partial shade which means it can continue to operate at maximum panel power when the panel is partly shaded and the panel voltage has dropped. This he figured would gather energy from the sun to charge a 12 v battery and with the use of an inexpensive 12 v to 5 v buck module power the raspberry pi 3 model b and an eight megapixel raspberry pi camera module v2.

Power management board hat a power management board is connected to your pi 3 pi zero or any other model of pi. A venus gx costs nearly 300 and a raspberry pi costs about 30. Rock band make your own musical instruments with code blocks. Track the sun and turn the panels for 25 30 more power.

Solar power system for your arduino raspberry pi.