With hobbyists constantly creating new gadgets, we often find that powering them in the field can be difficult! If you’ve got access to mains electricity — great. But if not, you have to carefully consider power sources and options. The Atverter is a programmable DC-DC buck/boost converter that is flexible enough to be used in a large variety of projects.
It can accept up to 60VDC on the input side, allowing a range of solar and renewable energy sources to be used. Lead acid batteries can be a great way to store power from solar arrays, but then getting an efficient DC-DC converter that can cope with varying input voltages — and also be bidirectional to charge the batteries if needed — can have you spending ages going over power supply designs, or looking at pages of DC-DC modules on supplier websites.
The Atverter is designed to be programmable, meaning you can set it up for a wide variety of scenarios. This is particularly useful if your project needs to travel from place to place, where the available voltages might not always be the same. It can be monitored over UART or I2C, and is also DIN-rail mountable which is a nice feature! It also has the standard Raspberry Pi 40-pin header to make integration with Pis a breeze.
Keep an eye out in the coming months as seller Picrogrid adds more documentation and example code, including a solar MPPT battery charger, and setting up a DC microgrid with a Raspberry Pi!
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