I have few of these T40 40A MPPT solar chargers. Tried one and seemed to work. Planned to use them for my solar setup but was not too impressed, compared to Renogy Rover 30A this produced about 30-35% lower current from same panel.
Opened one to see how easy would be to hack and read values from it, and was surprised with lack of power inductor. See pics. The plugin board with LCD has only MCU.
Would this be using PV wiring inductance for voltage conversion? This is a step down converter, what kind of step-down converter can use inductor in series with power source, without secondary inductor ?
UPDATE: found something, there is a relatively new design using parasiting cable inductance called S-Hybrid. It uses 3 switches which would correspond to number of power transistors (there are 6 but each pair is in parallel).
Opened one to see how easy would be to hack and read values from it, and was surprised with lack of power inductor. See pics. The plugin board with LCD has only MCU.
Would this be using PV wiring inductance for voltage conversion? This is a step down converter, what kind of step-down converter can use inductor in series with power source, without secondary inductor ?
UPDATE: found something, there is a relatively new design using parasiting cable inductance called S-Hybrid. It uses 3 switches which would correspond to number of power transistors (there are 6 but each pair is in parallel).
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