So, I’ve been doing a bit of research about how I can stabilise the battery voltage which will drift between around 11V and 14.6V. It’s a deep-cycle type battery, so it’s actually capable of going down to 10V, but I really don’t want to push it that far.
Once I get below 12V, that’s the time to signal to the VM hosts to start hibernating the VMs and preparing for a blackout, until such time as the voltage picks back up again.
The rise above 13.5V is a challenge due to the PicoPSU limitations. @Vlad Conut rightly pointed out that the M3-ATX-HV PSUs sold by the same company would have been a better choice. For about $20 more, or an extra $100 for the cluster, I’d have something that’d work 6-30V. I’d still have to solve the problem with the switch, but it’d just be that one device, not 6.
Maybe it was because they were out of stock that I went the PicoPSU route, I also wasn’t sure about power demands, I knew the CPU needed 20W, but wasn’t sure about everything else. So I over-dimensioned everything. Hindsight is 20:20.
One option I considered was a regulator in front of each node. I had mentioned the LM7812 because I knew of it. I also knew it was a crap choice for this task, the 1.5V drop, with a 5A load would result in about 7.5W dissipated thermally. So 20W would jump to nearly 28W — not good.
That of course assumes a 7812 would handle 5A, which it won’t.
LDOs were the way to go for anything linear, otherwise I was looking at a switchmode power supply. The LM2576 has similar requirements to the LM7812, but is much more efficient being a buck converter. If 1.5V was fine, I’d be looking for a 5A-capable equivalent.
The other option would be to have one single power supply regulate power for all nodes. I mentioned in my previous log about the Redarc DC-DC power supply, and that is certainly still worthy of consideration. It is a single point of failure however, but then again, Redarc aren’t known for making crap, and the unit has a 2 year warranty anyway. I’d have downtime, but would not lose data if this went down.
@K.C. Lee pointed me to one LDO that would be a good candidate though, and is cheap enough to be worth the experiment: the Micrel MIC29750. 7.5A current, and comes in an adjustable form up to 16V. I’d imagine if I set this near 13.5V, it’d dissipate maybe 2.5W max at 5A, or 1W at 2A. Much better.
Not as good as Redarc’s solution of course, and that’s still an option, but cheap enough to try out.
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