rin67630
Solar Enthusiast
A buck-boost converter is really a nice thing to have, when you have a solar battery bank.
With such a device you can load secondary batteries e.g. from tools, laptops, eBikes, even with different voltages: lower or higher.
That Chinese 38V/6A DC-DC buck-boost converter is well manufactured and damn cheap.
It has that digital seven segment display to show the voltage or current and 4 miniature push buttons to set the voltage/current.
Well, it is usable, but not really comfortable...
I decided to change that and replaced the pluggable control unit by a self-build one consisting of a prototyping board and a TTGO ESP32 microcontroller with an integrated color display.
The BOM for the modification amounts to ~20$, just the TTGO module, a prototyping board and a few resistors/condensators.
Everything is self contained, no wires, cables, additional power supply, server, database, extra computer required.
Now the cheap buck-boost converter is transformed in a versatile networked programmable power supply:
- accessible from everywhere over the cloud
- programmable
- with charging profiles for many battery chemistries
- and a couple of additional functions like battery evaluation, internal resistance evaluation and so on...
the whole project is described at Github.
Enjoy!
With such a device you can load secondary batteries e.g. from tools, laptops, eBikes, even with different voltages: lower or higher.
That Chinese 38V/6A DC-DC buck-boost converter is well manufactured and damn cheap.
It has that digital seven segment display to show the voltage or current and 4 miniature push buttons to set the voltage/current.
Well, it is usable, but not really comfortable...
I decided to change that and replaced the pluggable control unit by a self-build one consisting of a prototyping board and a TTGO ESP32 microcontroller with an integrated color display.
The BOM for the modification amounts to ~20$, just the TTGO module, a prototyping board and a few resistors/condensators.
Everything is self contained, no wires, cables, additional power supply, server, database, extra computer required.
Now the cheap buck-boost converter is transformed in a versatile networked programmable power supply:
- accessible from everywhere over the cloud
- programmable
- with charging profiles for many battery chemistries
- and a couple of additional functions like battery evaluation, internal resistance evaluation and so on...
the whole project is described at Github.
Enjoy!
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