xantrex-tc2012

Solar Cluster: History repeats: another PSU fan bites the dust

Perhaps literally… it has bitten the dust.  Although I wouldn’t call its installed location, dusty.  Once again, the fan in the mains power supply has carked it.

Long-term followers of this project may remember that the last PSU failed the same way.

The reason has me miffed.  All I did with the replacement, was take the PSU out of its box, loosen the two nuts for the terminals, slip the ring lugs for my power lead over the terminals, returned the nuts, plugged it in and turned it on.

While it is running 24×7, there is nothing in the documentation to say this PSU can’t run that way.  This is what the installation looks like.

If it were dusty, I’d expect to be seeing hardware failures in my nodes.

This PSU is barely 4 months old, and earlier this week, the fan started making noises, and requiring percussive maintenance to get started. Tonight, it failed. Completely, no taps on the case will convince it to go.

Now, I need to keep things running until the weekend. I need it to run without burning the house down.

Many moons ago, my father bought a 12V fan for the caravan. Cheap and nasty. It has a slider switch to select between two speeds; “fast” and “slow”, which would be better named “scream like a banshee” and “scream slightly less like a banshee”. The speed reduction is achieved by passing current through a 10W resistor, and achieves maybe a 2% reduction in motor RPM. As you can gather, it proved to be a rather unwelcome room mate, and has seen its last day in the caravan.

This fan, given it runs off 12V, has proven quite handy with the cluster. I’ve got my SB-50 “load” socket hanging out the front of the cluster. A little adaptor to bring that out to a cigarette lighter socket, and I can run it off the cluster batteries. When a build job has gotten a node hot and bothered, sitting this down the bottom of the cluster and aiming it at a node has cooled things down well.

Tonight, it has another task … to try and suck the hot air out of the PSU.

That’s the offending power supply.  A PowerTech MP-3089.  It powers the RedARC BCDC-1225 right above it.  And you can see my kludge around the cooling problem.  Not great, but it should hold for the next 24 hours.

Tomorrow, I think we’ll call past Aspley and pick up another replacement.  I’m leery of another now, but I literally have no choice … I need it now.  Sadly, >250W 12V switchmode PSUs are somewhat rare beasts here in Brisbane.  Altronics don’t sell them that big.  The grinning glasses are no more, and I’m not risking it with the Xantrex charger again.

Long term, I’m already looking at the MeanWell SP-480-12.  This is a PSU module, and will need its own case and mains wiring… but I have no faith in the MP-3089 to not fail and cremate my home of 34 years.

The nice feature of the SP-480-12 is that it does have a remote +12V power-off feature.  Presumably I can drive this with a comparator/output MOSFET, so that when the battery voltage drops below some critical threshold, it kicks in, and when it rises above a high set-point, it drops out.  Simple control, with no MCU involved.  I don’t see a reason to get more fancy than that on the control side, anything more is a liability.

On other news, my gcc build on the TS-7670 failed … so much for the wait.  We’ll try another version and see how we go.

Solar Cluster: 2 days and counting on solar…

So, I’m home now for the Christmas break… and the fan in my power supply decided it would take a Christmas break itself.

The power supply was purchased brand new in June… it still works as a power supply, but with the fan seized up, it represents an overheating risk.  Unfortunately, the only real options I have are the Xantrex charger, which cooked my last batteries, or a 12V 20A linear PSU I normally use for my radio station.  20A is just a touch light-on, given the DC-DC converter draws 25A.  It’ll be fine to provide a top-up, but I wouldn’t want to use it for charging up flat batteries.

Now, I can replace the faulty fan.  However, that PSU is under warranty still, so I figure, back it goes!

In the meantime, an experiment.  What happens if I just turn the mains off and rely on the batteries?  Well, so far, so good.  Saturday afternoon, the batteries were fully charged, I unplugged the mains supply.  Battery voltage around 13.8V.

Sunday morning, battery was down to 12.1V, with about 1A coming in off the panels around 7AM (so 6A being drained from batteries by the cluster).

By 10AM, the solar panels were in full swing, and a good 15A was being pumped in, with the cluster drawing no more than 8A.  The batteries finished the day around 13.1V.

This morning, batteries were slightly lower at 11.9V.   Just checking now, I’m seeing over 16A flowing in from the panels, and the battery is at 13.2V.

I’m in the process of building some power meters based on NXP LPC810s and TI INA219Bs.  I’m at two minds what to use to poll them, whether I use a Raspberry Pi I have spare and buy a case, PSU and some sort of serial interface for it… or whether I purchase a small industrial PC for the job.

The Technologic Systems TS-7670 is one that I am considering, given they’ll work over a wide range of voltages and temperatures, they have plenty of UARTs including RS-485 and RS-232, and while they ship with an old Linux kernel, yours truly has ported both U-Boot and the mainline Linux kernel.  Yes, it’s ARMv5, but it doesn’t need to be a speed demon to capture lots of data, and they work just fine for Barangaroo where they poll Modbus (via pymodbus) and M-bus (via python-mbus).

Solar Cluster: Suspicions with the charger…

So, at present I’ve been using a two-charger solution to keep the batteries at full voltage.  On the solar side is the Powertech MP3735, which also does over-discharge protection.  On the mains side, I’m using a Xantrex TC2012.

One thing I’ve observed is that the TC2012, despite being configured for AGM batteries, despite the handbook saying it charges AGM batteries to a maximum 14.3V, has a happy knack of applying quite high charging voltages to the batteries.

I’ve verified this… every meter I’ve put across it has reported it at one time or another, more than 15V across the terminals of the charger.  I’m using SB50 connectors rated at 50A and short runs of 6G cable to the batteries.  So a nice low-resistance path.

The literature I’ve read says 14.8V is the maximum.  I think something has gone out of calibration!

This, and the fact that the previous set-up over-discharged the batteries twice, are the factors that lead to the early failure of both batteries.

The two new batteries (Century C12-105DA) are now sitting in the battery cases replacing the two Giant Energy batteries, which will probably find themselves on a trip to the Upper Kedron recycling facility in the near future.

The Century batteries were chosen as I needed the replacements right now and couldn’t wait for shipping.  This just happened to be what SuperCheap Auto at Keperra sell.

The Giant Energy batteries took a number of weeks to arrive: likely because the seller (who’s about 2 hours drive from me) had run out of stock and needed to order them in (from China).  If things weren’t so critical, I might’ve given those batteries another shot, but I really didn’t have the time to order in new ones.

I have disconnected the Xantrex TC2012.  I really am leery about using it, having had one bad experience with it now.  The replacement batteries cost me $1000.  I don’t want to be repeating the exercise.

I have a couple of options:

  1. Ditch the idea of using mains power and just go solar.
  2. Dig out the Redarc BCDC1225 charger I was using before and hook that up to a regulated power supply.
  3. Source a new 20A mains charger to hook in parallel with the batteries.
  4. Hook a dumb fixed-voltage power supply in parallel with the batteries.
  5. Hook a dumb fixed-voltage power supply in parallel with the solar panel.

Option (1) sounds good, but what if there’s a run of cloudy days?  This really is only an option once I get some supervisory monitoring going.  I have the current shunts fitted and the TI INA219Bs for measuring those shunts arrived a week or so back, just haven’t had the time to put that into service.  This will need engineering time.

Option (2) could be done right now… and let’s face it, its problem was switching from solar to mains.  In this application, it’d be permanently wired up in boost mode.  Moreover, it’s theoretically impossible to over-discharge the batteries now as the MP3735 should be looking after that.

Option (3) would need some research as to what would do the job.  More money to spend, and no guarantee that the result will be any better than what I have now.

Option (4) I’m leery about, as there’s every possibility that the power supply could be overloaded by inrush current to the battery.  I could rig up a PWM circuit in concert with the monitoring I’m planning on putting in, but this requires engineering time to figure out.

Option (5) I’m also leery about, not sure how the panels will react to having a DC supply in parallel to them.  The MP3735 allegedly can take an input DC supply as low as 9V and boost that up, so might see a 13.8V switchmode PSU as a solar panel on a really cloudy day.  I’m not sure though.  I can experiment, plug it in and see how it reacts.  Research gives mixed advice, with this Stack Exchange post saying yes and this Reddit thread suggesting no.

I know now that the cluster averages about 7A.  In theory, I should have 30 hours capacity in the batteries I have now, if I get enough sun to keep them charged.

This I think, will be a week-end experiment, and maybe something I’ll try this weekend.  Right now, the cluster itself is running from my 40A switchmode PSU, and for now, it can stay there.

I’ll let the solar charger top the batteries up from the sun this week.  With no load, the batteries should be nice and full, ready come Friday evening, when I can, gracefully, bring the cluster down and hook it up to the solar charger load output.  If, at the end of the weekend, it’s looking healthy, I might be inclined to leave it that way.

Solar Cluster: Remember kids, over-discharge protection matters!

So, yesterday I had this idea of building an IC storage unit to solve a problem I was facing with the storage of IC tubes, and to solve an identical problem faced at HSBNE.

It turned out to be a longish project, and by 11:30PM, I had gotten far, but still had a bit of work to do.  Rather than slog it out overnight, I thought I’d head home and resume it the next day.  Instead of carting the lot home, and back again, I decided to leave my bicycle trailer with all the project gear and my laptop, stashed at HSBNE’s wood shop.

By the time I had closed up the shop and gotten going, it was after midnight.  That said, the hour of day was a blessing: there was practically no traffic, so I road on the road most of the way, including the notorious Kingsford-Smith Drive.  I made it home in record time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.  A record that stood until later this morning coming the other way, doing the run in 1:10.

I was exhausted, and was thinking about bed, but wheeling the bicycle up the drive way and opening the garage door, I caught a whiff.  What’s that smell?  Sulphur??

Remember last post I had battery trouble, so isolated the crook battery and left the “good” one connected?

The charger was going flat chat, and the battery case was hot!  I took no chances, I switched the charger off at the wall and yanked the connection to the battery wiring harness.  I grabbed some chemical handling gloves and heaved the battery case out.  Yep, that battery was steaming!  Literally!

This was the last thing I wanted to deal with at nearly 2AM on a Sunday morning.  I did have two new batteries, but hadn’t yet installed them.  I swapped the one I had pulled out last fortnight, and put in one of the new ones.  I wanted to give them a maintenance charge before letting them loose on the cluster.

The other dud battery posed a risk though, with the battery so hot and under high pressure, there was a good chance that it could rupture if it hadn’t already.  A shower of sulphuric acid was not something I wanted.

I decided there was nothing running on the cluster that I needed until I got up later today, so left the whole kit off, figuring I’d wait for that battery to cool down.

5AM, I woke up, checked the battery, still warm.  Playing it safe, I dusted off the 40A switchmode PSU I had originally used to power the Redarc controller, and plugged it directly into the cluster, bypassing the batteries and controller.  That would at least get the system up.

This evening, I get home (getting a lift), and sure enough, the battery has cooled down, so I swap it out with another of the new batteries.  One of the new batteries is charging from the mains now, and I’ll do the second tomorrow.

See if you can pick out which one is which…

Solar Cluster: WTF

So… with the new controller we’re able to see how much current we’re getting from the solar.  I note they omit the solar voltage, and I suspect the current is how much is coming out of the MPPT stage, but still, it’s more information than we had before.

With this, we noticed that on a good day, we were getting… 7A.

That’s about what we’d expect for one panel.  What’s going on?  Must be a wiring fault!

I’ll admit when I made the mounting for the solar controller, I didn’t account for the bend radius in the 6gauge wire I was using, and found it was difficult to feed it into the controller properly.  No worries, this morning at 4AM I powered everything off, took the solar controller off, drilled 6 new holes a bit lower down, fed the wires through and screwed them back in.

Whilst it was all off, I decided I’d individually charge the batteries.  So, right-hand battery came first, I hook the mains charger directly up and let ‘er rip.  Less than 30 minutes later, it was done.

So, disconnect that, hook up the left hand battery.  45 minutes later the charger’s still grinding away.  WTF?

Feel the battery… it is hot!  Double WTF?

It would appear that this particular battery is stuffed.  I’ve got one good one though, so for now I pull the dud out and run with just the one.

I hook everything up,  do some final checks, then power the lot back up.

Things seem to go well… I do my usual post-blackout dance of connecting my laptop up to the virtual instance management VLAN, waiting for the OpenNebula VM to fire up, then log into its interface (because we’re too kewl to have a command line tool to re-start an instance), see my router and gitea instances are “powered off”, and instruct the system to boot them.

They come up… I’m composing an email, hit send… “Could not resolve hostname”… WTF?  Wander downstairs, I note the LED on the main switch flashing furiously (as it does on power-up) and a chorus of POST beeps tells me the cluster got hard-power-cycled.  But why?  Okay, it’s up now, back up stairs, connect to the VLAN, re-start everything again.

About to send that email again… boompa!  Same error.  Sure enough, my router is down.  Wander downstairs, and as I get near, I hear the POST beeps again.  Battery voltage is good, about 13.2V.  WTF?

So, about to re-start everything, then I lose contact with my OpenNebula front-end.  Okay, something is definitely up.  Wander downstairs, and the hosts are booting again.  On a hunch I flick the off-switch to the mains charger.  Klunk, the whole lot goes off.  There’s no connection to the battery, and so when the charger drops its power to check the battery voltage, it brings the whole lot down.

WTF once more?  I jiggle some wires… no dice.  Unplug, plug back in, power blinks on then off again.  What is going on?

Finally, I pull right-hand battery out (the left-hand one is already out and cooling off, still very warm at this point), 13.2V between the negative terminal and positive on the battery, good… 13.2V between negative and the battery side of the isolator switch… unscrew the fuse holder… 13.2V between fuse holder terminal and the negative side…  but 0V between negative side on battery and the positive terminal on the SB50 connector.

No apparent loose connections, so I grab one of my spares, swap it with the existing fuse.  Screw the holder back together, plug the battery back in, and away it all goes.

This is the offending culprit.  It’s a 40A 5AG fuse.  Bought for its current carrying capacity, not for the “bling factor” (gold conductors).

If I put my multimeter in continuance test mode and hold a probe on each end cap, without moving the probes, I hear it go open-circuit, closed-circuit, open-circuit, closed-circuit.  Fuses don’t normally do that.

I have a few spares of these thankfully, but I will be buying a couple more to replace the one that’s now dead.  Ohh, and it looks like I’m up for another pair of batteries, and we will have a working spare 105Ah once I get the new ones in.

On the RAM front… the firm I bought the last lot through did get back to me, with some DDR3L ECC SO-DIMMs, again made by Kingston.  Sounded close enough, they were 20c a piece more (AU$855 for 6 vs $AU864.50).

Given that it was likely this would be an increasing problem, I thought I’d at least buy enough to ensure every node had two matched sticks in, so I told them to increase the quantity to 9 and to let me know what I owe them.

At first they sent me the updated invoice with the total amount (AU$1293.20).  No problems there.  It took a bit of back-and-forth before I finally confirmed they had the previous amount I sent them.  Great, so into the bank I trundle on Thursday morning with the updated invoice, and I pay the remainder (AU$428.70).

Friday, I get the email to say that product was no longer available.  They instead, suggested some Crucial modules which were $60 a piece cheaper.  Well, when entering a gold mine, one must prepare themselves for the shaft.

Checking the link, I found it: these were non-ECC.  1Gbit×64, not 1Gbit×72 like I had ordered.  In any case I was over it, I fired back an email telling them to cancel the order and return the money.  I was in no mood for Internet shopper Russian Roulette.

It turns out I can buy the original sticks through other suppliers, just not in the quantities I’m after.  So I might be able to buy one or two from a supplier, I can’t buy 9.  Kingston have stopped making them and so what’s left is whatever companies have in stock.

So I’ll have to move to something else.  It’d be worth buying one stick of the original type so I can pair it with one of the others, but no more than that.  I’m in no mood to do this in a few years time when parts are likely to be even harder to source… so I think I’ll bite the bullet and go 16GB modules.  Due to the limits on my debit card though, I’ll have to buy them two at a time (~$900AUD each go).  The plan is:

  1. Order in two 16GB modules and an 8GB module… take existing 8GB module out of one of the compute nodes and install the 16GB modules into that node.  Install the brand new 8GB module and the recovered 8GB module into two of the storage nodes.  One compute node now has 32GB RAM, and two storage nodes are now upgraded to 16GB each.  Remaining compute node and storage node each have 8GB.
  2. Order in two more 16GB modules… pull the existing 8GB module out of the other compute node, install the two 16GB modules.  Then install the old 8GB module into the remaining storage node.  All three storage nodes now have 16GB each, both compute nodes have 32GB each.
  3. Order two more 16GB modules, install into one compute node, it now has 64GB.
  4. Order in last two 16GB modules, install into the other compute node.

Yes, expensive, but sod it.  Once I’ve done this, the two nodes doing all the work will be at their maximum capacity.  The storage nodes are doing just fine with 8GB, so 16GB should mean there’s plenty of RAM for caching.

As for virtual machine management… I’m pretty much over OpenNebula.  Dealing with libvirt directly is no fun, but at least once configured, it works!  OpenNebula has a habit of not differentiating between a VM being powered off (as in, me logging into the guest and issuing a shutdown), and a VM being forcefully turned off by the host’s power getting yanked!

With one, there should be some event fired off by libvirt to tell OpenNebula that the VM has indeed turned itself off.  With the latter, it should observe that one moment the VM is there, and next it isn’t… the inference being that it should still be there, and that perhaps that VM should be re-started.

This could be a libvirt limitation too.  I’ll have to research that.  If it is, then the answer is clear: we ditch libvirt and DIY.  I’ll have to research how I can establish a quorum and schedule where VMs get put, but it should be doable without the hassle that OpenNebula has been so far, and without going to the utter tedium that is OpenStack.

Solar Cluster: BCDC1225 switching between solar and mains not reliable

So yeah, it seems history repeats itself.  The Redarc BCDC1225 is not reliable in switching between solar inputs and 12V input derived from the mains.

At least this morning’s wake-up call was a little later in the morning:

From: ipmi@hydrogen.ipmi.lan
To: stuartl@longlandclan.id.au
Subject: IPMI hydrogen.ipmi.lan
Message-Id: <20171023194305.72ECB200C625@atomos.longlandclan.id.au>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2017 05:43:05 +1000 (EST)

Incoming alert
IP : xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Hostname: hydrogen.ipmi.lan
SEL_TIME:"1970/01/27 02:03:00" 
SENSOR_NUMBER:"30"
SENSOR_TYPE:"Voltage          "
SENSOR_ID:"12V             " 
EVENT_DESCRIPTION:"Lower Critical going low                                         "
EVENT_DIRECTION:"Assertion  "
EVENT SEVERITY:"non-critical"

We’re now rigging up the Xantrex charger that I was using in early testing and will probably use that for mains. I have a box wired up with a mains SSR for switching power to it.  I think that’ll be the long-term plan and the Redarc charger will be retired from service, perhaps we might use it in some non-critical portable station.

Solar Cluster: Solar Testing

So I’ve now had the solar panels up for a month now… and so far, we’ve had a run of very overcast or wet days.

Figures… and we thought this was the “sunshine state”?

I still haven’t done the automatic switching, so right now the mains power supply powers the relay that switches solar to mains.  Thus the only time my cluster runs from solar is when either I switch off the mains power supply manually, or if there’s a power interruption.

The latter has not yet happened… mains electricity supply here is pretty good in this part of Brisbane, the only time I recall losing it for an extended period of time was back in 2008, and that was pretty exceptional circumstances that caused it.

That said, the political football of energy costs is being kicked around, and you can bet they’ll screw something up, even if for now we are better off this side of the Tweed river.

A few weeks back, with predictions of a sunny day, I tried switching off the mains PSU in the early morning and letting the system run off the solar.  I don’t have any battery voltage logging or current logging as yet, but the system went fine during the day.  That evening, I turned the mains back on… but the charger, a Redarc BCDC1225, seemingly didn’t get that memo.  It merrily let both batteries drain out completely.

The IPMI BMCs complained bitterly about the sinking 12V rail at about 2AM when I was sound asleep.  Luckily, I was due to get up at 4AM that day.  When I tried checking a few things on the Internet, I first noticed I didn’t have a link to the Internet.  Look up at the switch in my room and saw the link LED for the cluster was out.

At that point, some choice words were quietly muttered, and I wandered downstairs with multimeter in hand to investigate.  The batteries had been drained to 4.5V!!!

I immediately performed some load-shedding (ripped out all the nodes’ power leads) and power-cycled the mains PSU.  That woke the charger up from its slumber, and after about 30 seconds, there was enough power to bring the two Ethernet switches in the rack online.  I let the voltage rise a little more, then gradually started re-connecting power to the nodes, each one coming up as it was plugged in.

The virtual machine instances I had running outside OpenNebula came up just fine without any interaction from me, but  it seems OpenNebula didn’t see it fit to re-start the VMs it was responsible for.  Not sure if that is a misconfiguration, or if I need to look at an alternate solution.

Truth be told, I’m not a fan of libvirt either… overly complicated for starting QEMU VMs.  I might DIY a solution here as there’s lots of things that QEMU can do which libvirt ignores or makes more difficult than it should be.

Anyway… since that fateful night, I have on two occasions run the cluster from solar without incident.  On the off-chance though, I have an alternate charger which I might install at some point.  The downside is it doesn’t boost the 12V input like the other one, so I’d be back to using that Xantrex charger to charge from mains power.

Already, I’m thinking about the criteria for selecting a power source.  It would appear there are a few approaches I can take, I can either purely look at the voltages seen at the solar input and on the battery, or I can look at current flow.

Voltage wise, I tried measuring the solar panel output whilst running the cluster today.  In broad daylight, I get 19V off the panels, and at dusk it’s about 16V.

Judging from that, having the solar “turn on” at 18V and “turn off” at 15V seems logical.  Using the comparator approach, I’d need to set a reference of 16.5V and tweak the hysteresis to give me a ±3V swing.

However, this ignores how much energy is actually being produced from solar in relation to how much is being consumed.  It is possible for a day to start off sunny, then for the weather to cloud over.  Solar voltage in that case might be sitting at the 16V mentioned.

If the current is too low though, the cluster will drain more power out than is going in, and this will result in the exact conditions I had a few weeks ago: a flat battery bank.  Thus I’m thinking of incorporating current shunts both on the “input” to the battery bank, and to the “output”.  If output is greater than input, we need mains power.

There’s plenty of literature about interfacing to current shunts.  I’ll have to do some research, but immediately I’m thinking an op-amp running from the battery configured as a non-inverting DC gain block with the inputs going to either side of the current shunt.

Combining the approaches is attractive.  So turn on when solar exceeds 18V, turn off when battery output current exceeds battery input current.  A dual op-amp, a dual comparator, two current shunts, a R-S flip-flop and a P-MOSFET for switching the relay, and no hysteresis calculations needed.

Solar Cluster: Rack taking shape

Well, it’s been a while since I last updated this project. Lots have been due to general lethargy, real life and other pressures.

This equipment is being built amongst other things to host my websites, mail server, and as a learning tool for managing clustered computing resources. As such, yes, I’ll be putting it down as a work expense… and it was pointed out to me that it needed to be in operation before I could start claiming it on tax. So, with 30th June looming up soon, it was time I pulled my finger out and got it going.

At least running on mains. As for the solar bit, well we will be doing that too, my father recently sent me this email (line breaks for readability):

Subject: Why you're about to pay through the nose for power - ABC News
 (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
To: Stuart Longland
From: David Longland
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-19/…
   …why-youre-about-to-pay-through-the-nose-for-power/8629090

Hi Stuart,

This is why I am keen to see your cluster up and running.  Our power 
bill is about $300 every 3 months, a lift in price by 20% represents 
$240pa hike.

Dad

Umm, yeah… good point. Our current little server represents a small portion of our base-load power… refrigeration being the other major component.

I ordered the rack and batteries a few months back, and both have been sitting here, still in the boxes they were shipped in, waiting for me to get to and put them together. My father got fed up of waiting and attacked the rack, putting it together one evening… and last night, we worked together on putting a back on the rack using 12mm plywood.

We also fitted the two switches, mounting the smaller one to the lid of the main switch using multiple layers of double-sided tape.

I wasn’t sure at first where the DIN rail would mount. I had intended to screw it to a piece of 2×4″ or similar, and screw that to the back plane. We couldn’t screw the DIN rail directly to the back plane because the nodes need to be introduced to the DIN rail at an angle, then brought level to attach them.

Considering the above, we initially thought we’d bolt it to the inner run of holes, but two problems presented themselves:

  1. The side panels actually covered over those holes: this was solved with a metal nibbling tool, cutting a slot where the hole is positioned.
  2. The DIN rail, when just mounted at each end, lacked the stability.

I measured the gap between the back panel and the DIN rail location: 45mm. We didn’t have anything that was that width which we could use as a mounting. We considered fashioning a bracket out of some metal strip, but bending it right could be a challenge without the right tools. (and my metalwork skills were never great.)

45mm + 3mm is 48mm… or 4× plywood pieces. We had plenty of off-cut from the back panel.

Using 4 pieces of the plywood glued together and clamped overnight, I made a mounting to which I could mount the DIN rail for the nodes to sit on. This afternoon, I drilled the pilot holes and fitted the screws for mounting that block, and screwed the DIN rail to it.

At the far ends, I made spacers from 3mm aluminium metal strap. The result is not perfect, but is much better than what we had before.

I’ve wired up the network cables… checking the lengths of those in case I needed to get longer cables. (They just fit… phew! $20 saved.) and there is room down the bottom for the batteries to sit. I’ll make a small 10cm cable to link the management network up to the appropriate port on the main switch, then I just need to run cables to the upstairs and downstairs switches. (In fact, there’s one into the area already.)

On the power front… my earlier experiments had ascertained the suitability of the Xantrex charger that we had spare. The charger is a smart charger, and so does various equalisation and balancing cycles, thus gets mightily confused if you suddenly disconnect the battery from it by way of a MOSFET. A different solution presented itself though.

My father has a solar set-up in the back of his car… there’s a 12V 120W panel on the roof, and that provides power to a battery system which powers an amateur radio station and serves as an auxiliary battery. There’s a diode arrangement that allows charging from the vehicle battery system.

In an effort to try and upgrade it, he bought a Redarc BCDC1225 in-vehicle MPPT charger. This charger can accept power from either the 12V mains supply in a vehicle, or from a “12V” solar panel. The key here, is it relies on a changeover relay to switch between the two, and this is where it wasn’t quite suitable for my father’s needs: it assumed that if the vehicle ignition was on, you wanted to charge from the vehicle, not from solar.

He wanted it to switch to whichever source was more plentiful, and had thought the unit would drive the relay itself. Having read the manual, we now know the signal they tell you to connect to the relay coil is there to tell the charger which source it is plugged into, not for it to drive the relay.

The plan is therefore:

  • use a 240V→12V AC-DC switch-mode power supply to provide the “vehicle mains” DC input to the charger.
  • measure the voltage seen at the solar input with a comparator and switch over when it is above some pre-defined voltage (use hysteresis to ensure it doesn’t oscillate)
  • use the output to drive a P-channel MOSFET attached to the “vehicle mains”, which drives the relay.

Solar Cluster: Re-working the charge controller, setting up a home

So, having knocked the regulation on the LDOs down a few pegs… I am closer to the point where I can leave the whole rig running unattended.

One thing I observed prior to the adjustment of the LDOs was that the controller would switch in the mains charger, see the voltage shoot up quickly to about 15.5V, before going HOLYCRAP and turning the charger off.

I had set a set point at about 13.6V based on two facts:

  • The IPMI BMCs complained when the voltage raised above this point
  • The battery is nominally 13.8V

As mentioned, I’m used to my very simple, slow charger, that trickle charges at constant voltage with maximum current output of 3A. The Xantrex charger I’m using is quite a bit more grunty than that. So re-visiting the LDOs was necessary, and there, I have some good results, albeit with a trade-off in efficiency.

Ahh well, can’t have it all.

I can run without the little controller, as right now, I have no panels. Well, I’ve got one, a 40W one, which puts out 3A on a good day. A good match for my homebrew charger to charge batteries in the field, but not a good match for a cluster that idles at 5A. I could just plug the charger directly into the battery and be done with it for now, defer this until I get the panels.

But I won’t.

I’ve been doing some thought about two things, the controller and the rack. On the rack, I found I can get a cheap one for $200. That is cheap enough to be considered disposable, and while sure it’s meant for DJ equipment, two thoughts come to mind:

  • AV equipment with all its audio transformers and linear power supplies, is generally not light
  • It’s on wheels, meant to be moved around… think roadies and such… not a use case that is gentle on equipment

Thus I figure it’ll be rugged enough to handle what I want, and is open enough to allow good airflow. I should be able to put up to 3 AGM batteries in the bottom, the 3-channel charger bolted to the side, with one charge controller per battery. There are some cheap 30A schottky diodes, which would let me parallel the batteries together to form one redundant power supply.

Downside being that would drop about 20-25W through the diode. Alternatively, I make another controller that just chooses the highest voltage source, with a beefy capacitor bank to handle the switch-over. Or I parallel the batteries together, something I am not keen to do.

I spent some time going back to the drawing board on the controller. The good news, the existing hardware will do the job, so no new board needed. I might even be able to simplify logic, since it’s the battery voltage that matters, not the source voltages. But, right now I need to run. So perhaps tomorrow I’ll go through the changes. 😉

Solar Cluster: … and it WORKS

Okay, so now the searing heat of the day has dissipated a bit, I’ve dragged the cluster out and got everything running.

No homebrew charge controller, we have:

240v mains → 20A battery charger → battery → volt/current meter → cluster.

Here’s the volt meter, showing the battery voltage mid-charge:

… and this is what the IPMI sensor readings display…

Okay, the 3.3V and 5V rails are lower than I’d expect, but that’s the duty of the PSU/motherboard, not my direct problem.

The nodes also vary a bit… here’s another one. Same set-up, and this time I’ll show the thresholds (which are the same on all nodes):

Going forward… I need to get the cluster solar ready. Running it all from 12V is half the story, but I need to be able to manage switching between mains and solar.

The battery I am using at the moment is a second-hand 100Ah (so more realistically ~70Ah) AGM cell battery. I have made a simple charger for my LiFePO₄ packs that I use on the bicycle, there I just use a LM2576 switchmode regulator to put out a constant voltage at 3A and leave the battery connected to “trickle charge”. Crude, but it works. When at home, I use a former IBM laptop power supply to provide 16V 3A… when camping I use a 40W “12V” solar panel. I’m able to use either to charge my batteries.

The low output means I can just leave it running. 3A is well below the maximum inrush current capacity of the batteries I use (typically 10 or 20Ah) which can often handle more than 1C charging current.

Here, I’m using an off-the-shelf charger made by Xantrex, and it is significantly more sophisticated, using PWM control, multi-stage charging, temperature compensation, etc. It also puts out a good bit more power than my simple charger.

Consequently I see a faster rise in the voltage, and that is something my little controller will have to expect.

In short, I am going to need a more sophisticated state machine… one that leaves the cut-off voltage decision to the charger. One that notices the sudden drop from ~15V to ~14V and shuts off or switches only after it remains at that level for some time (or gets below some critical limit).