Well, not sure what went wrong, but the controller I built on Monday evening, dead-bug style, is one big fail.
There’s no output from the LM311s, even after adding pull-ups, they still don’t seem to respond to the battery voltage falling below the threshold. Add to that, a faulty IRF540N MOSFET (drain-source resistance of ~40Ω), and you’ve got all the makings of things going wrong.
So time for a U-turn, after deciding against doing a microcontroller-based solution before on the grounds I had the parts on hand to do an analogue comparator solution, I’ve decided I’ll do it with a ATTiny24A after all. I can get these for about $12 for a pack of 5 from a local supplier.
I also have placed on order, two 5V switchmode PSU modules and four P-channel MOSFETs: we’ll drop the relay as well and make it all solid-state.
The MCU doesn’t have to do much, just take an ADC reading every 100msec of the battery voltage, compare it to a threshold then either turn on or turn off the power.
The MCU has up to 6 ADC channels, embeds a small temperature sensor, has one PWM channel and a number of GPIOs. Reserving the reset and SPI lines for ISP work, that gives us 3 digital outputs and one PWM for controlling things and 4 ADC channels.
I can use the PWM channel to drive a MOSFET for the fans, one of the outputs to drive NPN transistors for controlling the ACPI power buttons on the nodes, and two MOSFETs for the mains and solar inputs. 3 ADCs can monitor the battery, mains and solar inputs, so decisions can be made on whether to switch between solar/mains or to turn off all inputs and let the battery drain for a bit.
The internal temperature sensor can be used for fan control. The internal 8MHz oscillator will be “good enough” I think. It mainly needs to tell the difference between hot and cold. If things are >25°C, then we should run the fans, the hotter it is, the faster they should run.
This isn’t rocket-science, and should be achievable via a simple while loop in C.
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