Building a maximum power point tracker (MPPT) - The Byte Sized Engineer | DigiKey

Powering your electronics project using a solar panel can be fun, but how do you know if you're extracting and utilizing all the power a panel can provide? I built a maximum power point tracking solar charge controller to make sure I could extract all the power available from my solar panel. Full bill of materials can be found here: https://www.digikey.com/en/mylists/list/6UR93Q1BYV Github repository with all source files can be found here: https://github.com/bytesizedengineering/mppt-charge-controller Byte Sized Engineer channel - https://www.youtube.com/@bytesizedengineering Maker.io - https://www.digikey.com/en/maker DigiKey’s Blog – TheCircuit https://www.digikey.com/en/blog Connect with Digi-Key on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/digikey.electronics/ And follow us on X https://twitter.com/digikey Video Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 00:27 Solar panel specifications 02:09 Measuring a power curve 04:12 Graphing a power curve 05:18 Using a buck converter SMPS 06:08 Designing my own MPPT charge controller 06:35 Using the typical application circuit of the BQ24650 07:36 Assembling the custom PCB 09:23 Testing and troubleshooting the PCB 12:03 Writing MPPT firmware 13:35 Connecting a solar panel to the MPPT charge controller