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Solar charging/discharging the battery is functional

A project log for CUBEX

High Altitude Balloon payload capable of streaming live pictures, gps coordinates, and data telemetry.

arkoarko 03/05/2014 at 18:440 Comments

Since a lot of my project time has been working on the Layerone 2014 Conference badge with charliex, I haven't had a whole lot of time to work on CUBEX. 

Thankfully, I was able to ship a few boards to my friend Anthony Stirk from HAB Supplies in the UK who bought the parts and is now assembling and testing the board! He reported back today saying that the board was able to charge the battery using a power supply (since the UK doesn't really have a sun to test solar charging). He then placed a resistor load on the VCC and discharged the battery to the programmed 2.7v cutoff (done to protect the battery). So the power board is doing exactly what it was designed to do, charging the battery and cutoff the battery if the HAB draws too much energy preventing it from damaging the battery. As a side note, the battery will be reconnected automatically as soon as it has been filled up to a safe voltage. It's always a good feeling when a design works as intended! Huge thanks to Anthony! 

My parts from digikey/newark should arrive sometime early next week, so I can finally get this project going on my end.. launch is 3 months away!


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