Solar Street Light

Introduction

Here is a production ready solar powered street light. It has been tested over the past 4 years in order to achieve the optimal lead acid battery life cycle. It has served as a test bench for AVR acorn kernel micro operating system - highly optimized kernel for AVR devices written in assembler only. It is open source an actively developed by the community.

The project is tailored to utilize photo-voltaic panels of up to 25V/5A , which is 120W maximum output power. In respect to the solar power availability, lead acid battery 12V/50Ah was chosen. The circuit design is based on AVR Mega88 running megaAcorn kernel.

The kernel monitors the PV voltage, sun light availability, lead-acid battery charge/discharge life cycle and load(street light) balance. The load(street light) is turned on at dusk and stays on until one of the 2 happens: the battery discharge crosses the voltage threshold barrier or the sun light is detected.

Charge cycle is PWM controlled - battery is considered fully charged at 13.5V and disconnected from charge cycle. Sleep CPU mode is utilized to reduce control board power consumption.

Circuit, pcb board and gerber design were created by myNetPCB - small and light weight open-source software.

Everything that is needed for the project is available as a single bundle.

The entire project is based around open - source projects

1. Acorn micro kernel operating system

2. myNetPCB circuit and pcb board design - source code

3. myNetPCB circuit and pcb board design - application