With another month of nearly flawless behaviour, I am going to have to say that SolarDock is done.

Sure there is some weirdness when turning on and off where some postcaps don't "hear" the NRF and so don't turn on or off in response to the broadcast message. This appears to be fairly random and clears up on it's own without any intervention from me.

Last weekend, we sat out on the dock for a couple of hours one evening with all of the lights on, and it worked without issue, the only effect was that it took a little longer to reach full charge the following day.

Back on November 6 I wrote that I was seeing 1.1A coming from the panel. This weekend I was out on the dock in the morning and I looked at the charge controller, the panel was at the time producing 4A!

This was not at peak production time so I think the peak is even higher, I may never know as I don't have the time to site and watch it. I think at some point hook I may up my serial DVM and record the output against time. I can use the panel fuse holder for this.

After trying to cut the micro controller off the board and in the process lifting pads, I needed to populate a new board. I was fortunate enough to be able to rescue everything but the micro. I haven't yet tested the ADC sections, but I am hopeful that they and the opto-isolator are still good.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I was going to design and build a solar tracker. As time has gone by, this has become more necessary.

When I first set the panel angle I was getting great performance (fairly consistent 1.1A off the panel). Now, 3 weeks later, not so much as the angles are all wrong again, and I am back to getting about 20 minutes of runtime in the evening.

After the last post, I monitored the charging system and battery more closely to see if changing the angle made any difference...

It had not.

As mentioned I thought I had got the angle wrong again, so I decided I needed to make adjustments. I used the principle that something pointing directly at the sun casts its shadow directly below itself (it looks like there is no shadow at all). My tri-square has an edge that is nominally square so it will stand perpendicular to the surface it is on.