After squeezing every bit of my free time and every word on the pics flash memory I have completed all the major functions I have been planning in software.
We have two pieces of software in this project with below functionality
- Firmware with C running on PIC covering below functions
- Boost converter for charging and battery charging algorithm
- Driving led with constant current
- Sleeping and saving power as much as possible while checking motion sensor, analog sensor, solar power and usb connection whether to wake up or continue sleeping
- Supply status and configuration based on received USB hid data. Saving configuration to PIC's flash memory.
- Keeps log of battery condition, charge and send them over USB.
- Control panel software with Java running on any platform with JVM and usb host.
- Displays battery, panel and charge voltages and charge current
- Displays battery and charge log
- Configures device displaying configuration ui and sending saved values over USB.
Aside from more complex problems of firmware and software I spent most of my time around one completely idiotic comparison mistake and another weird issue about not being able to retain configuration values in flash. I found the solution to the error in flash as well using all my google-fu in a single forum in a super little post. So long story short a certain silicon revision of PIC16f1455 cant write to its flash while working at 48 Mhz which is needed for usb to work. At first was a real disaster for me as the whole point of usb was to send and store device configurations. But then I found a solution which was to get the config values, detach usb module, slow down to 4 mhz store config values and then attach usb module. So after save device gets detached for a while but firmware and software handles that. Besides that newer silicon revisions do not have this problem.
Here are some screenshot of desktop software. I will publish both firmware and software soon once I have time to start the project on github.
After all these oranges and reds if still someone manages to explode a battery with this charger or smoke a led it's completely their color blindness.
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