Solar Power Update

So, I’ve been working on this project for quite a while, years in fact. About a week ago, I picked up a new toy for this project, an Apollo T80 Turbocharger. These guys claim to fame is that they made a very similar device, at the request of NASA, to maximize the power from solar panels from some space mission. Good quality stuff, they know charge controllers. They do not by default, sadly, give any documents or software to actually hook this thing up to a computer and know whats going on. About 3 hours of reverse engineering, I had a fairly good idea of what was there, and began working on a framework to gather the data collected through the data.

Enter the Russian – and a day later I have 6 revisions and a (somewhat) working app.

So, Wed was the first day that I collected a days worth of data, and started to see what the #s look like.

Top line is Volts, Bottom is Amps. Peak at about 28amps or 1600 watts. Not bad. Today was a terrible cloudy day, with lots of rain and terrible storms, Now that I can keep the data, I’ll be able to make a graph at any time to see how things are running. Now I want more panels!

Thanks Alex