This picture show a salvaged Pentium 4 cooling plate with fan mounted on top of it.

The complete MPPT solar charger is mounted to the cooling plate, using a aluminium U profile, where the MOSFETs and voltage regulator are placed.

The picture above shows the aluminium U profile, as You can se it is a few millimeters to wide..

To complete the mppt solar charger project, i still need to do some work with a plastic cabinet, and also i will make some kind of temperature controlled PWM speed adjustment for the fan.

Update 20-12-2014: this arduino mppt charger shield is tested and works withTim Nolans version of the arduino sketch. The placement of the mosfet’s on th

e circuit board was designed to fit to a Aluminium U profile.

Just make sure you don’t try to cool down the power from a 9 map solar panel, with this small aluminium Profile.

To do that, you need a bigger cooling plate. You can find a link in the article below for an example of how to use a salvaged pentium 4 cooling plate.

This project is inspired but the original Peak Power Tracker Battery Charger Project made by Tim Nolan. Unfortunally he’s website is down, so i will try to recover the specs and bilding material from his page.

The mppt solar charger with arduino is designed so a 12V (20 volt peak) solar panel  can do the charging of a 12V lead acid battery.

Tim Nolan used a Arduino Duemilanove development board, in this project i have used both Duemilanove and Uno (r3) as the basic platform.

Tim Nolan used a Arduino Protoshield Kit for he’s development, i did that in my first version, but i became more and more happy for this project, and desided to make my own pcb layout based on Tim Nolan’s original project.

The project original consist of a number of files, most still have fully working link

• PPT Charger schematic (EagleCAD), this link still works: ArduinoSolar.pdf
• PPT Charger Hardware Description: link to ArduinoSolarHardware.txt broken, but this stll works:  ArduinoSolarHardware.rtf
• PPT Charger Parts List still works : ArduinoSolarPartsList.txt
• PPT Charger Software (the original Arduino Sketch by Tim Nolan) is still online: ppt.pde
• PPT Charger Photos links are still working : Duemilanove and Protoshield, Prototshield back, Protoshield front

He made a article on http://www.homepower.com on how Peak Power Tracking works. The original article is still online: Peak Power Tracking article.pdf

More cooling options for te arduino mppt solar charger

Open source pcb made for Tim nolan’s mppt solar charger

This is a version rc1 of the pcb, and i will try using irl540 MOSFET instead of irfz44

Download eagle pcb and schematic source files:

Arduino MPPT shield schematic and pcb eagle files for rc1

Free thanks