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Solar Boat Controller

Power management system for solar powered electric outboard sailboat.

morganmorgan
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I was given a sailboat by an off the grid type. They ditched the (broken) petrol outboard in favor of a surprisingly strong 36V Minn Kota Maxxus 101 (lbs thrust) electric trolling motor. When I got the boat it had effectively 3 separate power systems.

* 120V shore power. Connect when in the slip, original boat wiring, used for SLA charger.
* 12V solar. 3 12V SLA batteries (parallel) in the engine compartment powered galley lights.
* 12V outboard. 3 more 12V SLA batteries (series) for the motor, these were charged from the shore power.

The result of this was the boat had *barely* enough power to get out of the marina and back in. The original setup wouldn't even charge the outboard batteries while sailing.

Fast forward to last week and I'm now the proud owner of a beefy 200Ah LiFePO4 battery capable of a sustained 600A(!) @ ~13V

The goal of this project is to make a single controller for all the boats power systems.

Goals

Input

Seamlessly charge the LiFePO4 battery from both solar panels with MPPT and dockside charger.

The battery came with a 120V charger so the transistion stage could look something like...

  • Detect dockside power
  • Disable MPPT charger
  • Relay to connect charger and battery

If both power sources could be utilized simultaneously even better.


Outputs

36V @ 50A for the motor.

12V @ ~10A for the cabin lighting & "car charger standard" (10A is a guess for now)

5V @ ~5A also for cabin, this might be multiple, smaller 12V -> 5V

Variable @ ? Might be nice to have one variable output. Could be used to run power tools directly, or charge a laptop at 19V directly.

Logging

Data is fun. Log all the data.

ChargeController.pdf

Very preliminary pass on schematic

Adobe Portable Document Format - 31.46 kB - 04/08/2018 at 19:10

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  • Updates, repairs, powa!

    morgan • 11/29/2018 at 05:22 • 5 comments

    Womp, womp. Firefox has been crashing a lot lately and well.... I lost a draft post from yesterday sooooo... this one won't be as long.

    General Boat Updates

    Earlier this summer before I got swamped with work a friend came around to help me give the boat a more thorough once than it's had since it officially became mine. The sail covers where damaged so I decided to pull the sails and store them below, all in all they're in good shape. The rigging will need full replacing. Two cables are fraying, tension is all over the place and the mast is out of shape. I've got my pricing done and it looks like it will be under $250 for more than enough cable, thimbles and crimps. Otherwise most of the hardware is in great shape, one of the previous owners replaced most of it with stainless steel parts.


    More Powa!

    I was given two Sanyo 195W solar panels! With this I decided to skip building a solar charge controller and focus on monitoring. I picked up some decent looking 30A controller that can both do MPPT and charge my LiFePO4 battery.

    Look at all those numbers!

    So with that coming later this week I want to think about current monitoring. Previously I was designing around the INA21x but I don't think that can handle above 26V. So any suggestions there would be helpful.

    OK, that's all. Next trip to the boat will be in the rain! Yaaaay! I need to go out during a decent downpour of mark all my leaks. That'll be fun.

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jlbrian7 wrote 04/14/2018 at 12:05 • point

I have seen a couple of people using this http://www.sailoog.com/openplotter.  If it fits your application, I would like to see how it works out.

  Are you sure? yes | no

morgan wrote 04/15/2018 at 03:39 • point

Cool, it does fit into my overarching goals so I'll give it a looking over in the future.

  Are you sure? yes | no

Tim Savage wrote 04/09/2018 at 09:11 • point

Sounds like a fun project. Some serious current going through some of those components. 

  Are you sure? yes | no

morgan wrote 04/09/2018 at 16:19 • point

Yeah and a bit of foreign territory for me but I think I'll manage.

  Are you sure? yes | no

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