Following the testing on Saturday and Sunday, methods of supplying power to the system were devised and a compromise between solar power and battery power was reached.
For the solar panels, to reduce costs and ensure power requirements were met, I created a plan to wire a series of smaller solar cells in a mixture of series and parallel to meet our specific needs.
The plan is to take 2 packs of 100pcs solar cells which provide 0.5V at 800mA and wire 33 in series to create a solar strip that provides 16.5V at 800mA and then repeat this for 5 more strips. These strips would then be wired together in parallel to provide 16.5V at 4.8A. These would then be routed into a PWM Charge Controller that would be designed by the team and fed into a 5A BMS (Battery Management System) Chip that is intended to keep our next item balanced out.
Once again to meet our specific needs and reduce costs, options were found to create our own battery using series/parallel connections of lithium-ion wholesale cells.
Each of these cells are 3.7V, 10A, 4000mAh batteries. For our system to work, we need 14.4V at a minimum of 2A and 12000mAh in order for the system to run for ~6 hours off of battery. To accomplish this, a 3 packs of 4 parallel connected batteries will be made which will put out 14.4V at up to 10A and meet our 12000mAh requirement. With the addition of the BMS and PWM Charge Controller, the batteries can be charged safely off of solar.
Lastly, newer fans were found which consume less power but provide and adequate CFM for a lower price.
Altogether, these changes not only help meet our proposed requirements, but reduced the Budget Costs from $600+ down to around $300.
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