Controller

Since my first attempt at solar, I have learnt a few things and several new bits of tech have been introduced into the market. Some of the new tech include; all-in-one inverters, bigger “better” batteries, shingled solar panels and micro-inverters…

New Parts

An all-in-one solar inverters can include the following functions in a single device;

• Solar Controller - MPPT (2x string inputs)
• Inverter - Converts DC (48v) to AC (pure sine wave @230v, 50 hertz)
• Battery Charger -
  • from Grid (AC -> DC)
  • from Solar Panels (DC -> DC)
• ATS / Line mode - Flicks over to Grid if solar or batteries are low
• BMS, Timers and Controls - Can program battery types, priorities and timers depending on how you want to power your loads and utilize your batteries.
• Stats / Alerts - WIFI enabled

So I’ve been busy building a new solar array, mostly as a hobby and its been crazy fun. Electrocuted my self twice, but luckily nothing too bad.

I’ll write up some more detail round the build, the metric collection and the things i have learnt over my time.

Keep in mind that NZ is in the southern hemisphere, so its winter as i’m writing this. Low sun hours! Stats publicly available via grafana here - https://grafana.sigtar.com

A nice easy post by Evgeniy on getting opensolaris on HP kit….

http://www.eject.name/2009/07/opensolaris-and-hp-smartarray.html

This is the perfect controller for adding additional sata drives into opensolaris (well in terms of price, the bandwidth of the PCI slot is the only negative part). The si3114 comes with the default bios that supports various raid configs, but this requires additional drivers to be loaded.

Essentially the “raid” on the card is called fakeraid as it does not actually process any data itself, but hooks into the cpu via a driver and lets your cpu do all the work.