Ladyada writes -
This is actually not any sort of product or public project (!) – its something we designed to help me evaluate solar panels and how they act when charging batteries. Normally this requires a lot of multimeters and its a bit of a pain to do if you have to constantly change out panels. So we decided we would build a specialized tool that would assist us. Here is what we wanted!This design is intended for ~6V panels, single Lithium Polymer cells and chargers. It can very easily be adapted to any kind of panel and charger, you’ll just need to adjust the resistor dividers and such!
- Portable! Its hard to test solar panels inside
- Ability to log to an SD card for long-term data analysis (to be added later)
- Keep track of the solar panel voltage
- Keep track of the battery voltage
- Keep track of how much current is going thru the panel to the charger
- We figured if we had to build this, someone might find my notes useful.
Read about the tester here.