Solar panel and battery

[power46]

Hi,
as soon as the Quartz64 Model B 8GB will be available I will finally enter the SBC world.

One of the medium/long term project would be to have it solar powered with a battery.
The aim is to learn more about electronics (I know that is quite silly for only 5-10 W).

Ideally I would like to be able:

- power it via solar + battery 24/7
- be able to monitor the power consumption and generation

I have noticed that for the Raspberry Pi there is already a solution https://uk.pi-supply.com/products/pijuice-solar.

I am not looking for an end-to-end solution, more for a guide, what to buy, some sort of explanation.

Do you have a suggestion on where to start from, especially for Pine64 products?

Thanks

[CounterPillow]

Hi,

this is quite an ambitious and neat project. I've dabbled in solar for a bit before, so here's what I know:

You will need a suitable panel and an MPPT charger. I'd usually recommend the SparkFun Sunny Buddy as a starting point for microcontrollers, but sadly it's limited to 450 mA charge current, which is not enough for an SBC. But "MPPT" is definitely the keyword you want to look for. As for generation monitoring, I don't know which chips/modules provide that, but they'd probably provide it over I²C. An INA219 would be suitable for providing power consumption monitoring of the SBC. Just make sure the INA219 has a shunt resistor selected to be able to measure up to 3A, this might involve buying a new shunt resistor and soldering it in parallel.

Additionally you then want the load side to be regulated 5V for the SBC to have a stable input.

By the way, if this PiJuice Solar thing has a schematic/pinout somewhere, I can check whether it might just be compatible with the Quartz64 Model B. Looks like it might be, but would need some device tree massaging to get things to work since we don't have the plug&play EEPROM overlays, and the I²C on Pin 5 and 3 need to be activated.

[power46]

Thank you very much for this information.
Is there a guide you can reference to get started with projects like this?

[CounterPillow]

I don't know of any guide, sorry.

[power46]

Thanks I will do some research

[dachalife]

Please keep us up to date with your progress.