Hello. I am very new to electronics so please forgive me. I have an Arduino Uno and can make an led blink, but it is time to move on. I read about the ESP32 being able to use wi-fi so as a php developer I just have to send something to a database. I like the idea of weather data to begin with so I have spent most of today going in circles reading about how to hook one up to a solar panel.
The Thing Plus board looked good, but removing LEDs and such to get the deep sleep power consumption to a reasonable amount looked fiddly. So now I am looking at the firebeetle board, but when I saw on Google images someone with a solar panel in their schematic for this board on a weather station, they ran the solar panel and the battery through a lipo solar charger board then on to the ESP32. I thought the board was able to take input through VCC for a solar panel, or would that just power the board rather than keep the battery topped up?
I thought it wise to understand how it works before buying the wrong parts. Many thanks for any advice.
The solar cells are 12V loaded, 17-ish V unloaded.
I use a 12V 8Ah LifePo4 battery.
I use a PWM charge controller.
The solar cells are wired in parallel and connected to the PWM charge controller.
The charge controller is connected to the battery.
The battery supplies a 5V switching regulator to power the MCU and circuits.
There is not a good Li solar solution.
I did, for a while, use a TP4056 to charge the battery and power the system. Nothing about the setup is hands off. A few times a year the Li battery will need replacing.
Sad to hear keeping a project like a weather station running independently with a small solar panel still isn't possible. You'd think humans would have figured out how to keep a lithium battery alive for a year by now.
Sad to hear keeping a project like a weather station running independently with a small solar panel still isn't possible. You'd think humans would have figured out how to keep a lithium battery alive for a year by now.
You've got a solution to be found that will make you a bundle!
iamjulian:
You'd think humans would have figured out how to keep a lithium battery alive for a year by now.
Well they have.
One approach is to sacrifice a bit of capacity from the Lithium battery and charge them with a voltage cutoff charger set to circa 3.9V, making sure that the charge current is also limited to a safe value.
You also need to make sure you dont let the Lithium battery go much below 3.3V.