Managing solar power systems with SunAir boards

Gathering Data

The next board project at SwitchDoc Labs is a version of SunAir that will be used in developing systems. It is a more expensive board, because it contains additional data-gathering hardware – specifically, a high-quality I2C four-channel AD converter for the photoresistors and an I2C three-channel IC for measuring currents and voltages. This allows the user to build a fully instrumented solar power system to really generate a lot of data, in addition to supplying space for an L239D motor controller.

SwitchDoc Labs has also licensed RasPiConnect from MiloCreek [22] to provide inexpensive control panels for SunAir and SunAirPlus. They will be available for $2.00 on the Apple App Store in February 2015. If you already own RasPiConnect, you will be able to download the XML configuration file from GitHub [4] under the SunTracker repository.

Conclusion

SunAir and SunTracker turned out to be enormous projects. I was expecting to spend a little more than about four weeks of work, but it has turned into three months and I'm not through yet.

I had to send the SunAir board to the manufacturer three times and spend a great deal of time in careful debugging to figure out why the board was not performing up to the complete specifications. Now, however, that part is done, and I am looking forward to building several new projects with these boards.

Additionally, I have had the Project Curaçao box shipped back to the frozen north, and I am refitting the solar power system in the box with the new, more reliable SunAirPlus boards.

SunTracker is morphing into a new project called SunRover, which will be a semi-autonomous solar-powered rover based on an Arduino and Raspberry Pi. With any luck, it will be running around the Caribbean in June 2015, but I need to make sure it can see cliffs. You can look for the SunRover project in a future issue of Raspberry Pi Geek magazine.