I have limited control electronics experience.
"you're a one eyed man in the kingdom of the blind."
Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
I've seen your projects and you have a dedication that makes me think you are capable of this. Have you done
anything with the UNO you purchased? A dump load would be a good starter for you. Read the voltage, average
the values, and send out a proportional dump signal between a start voltGE and a full on voltage. That couldn't
be ten lines of simple code. Built in functions do all the heavy lifting.
Next you could start keeping time. With known voltage, dump resistance and PWM duty cycle the watt hours can
be logged. When you get data, a lot is learnrd about a system that is never expected.
Then you can monitor that other dump. I'm partial to the ACS712 current sensor they sell on ebay for about $3.
These are mounted on a board with connectors and are available from 5-30A. These are a deal and you have total
isolation. I pity anyone who puts 30A through that chip. I buy the 5A version and parallel it with a shunt or
6 inches of wire. Even a couple of hundred counts is enough to make decisions with. Only three wires to connect
to the UNO. The A/D counter will sit at half. Subtract out a little more than half to get rid of noise and you're
done.
Lots of festures can be added three lines of code at a time. Control strategy is a tough one. At least any form
that doesn't work out can be quickly erased. Look at the discussion of heating water. Just turn on a SSR,
seperate inverter, or turn on an inverter for a period of time. If only one inverter do you monitor the input
current to see how much capacity is being used. You don't want to use 2KW inverter as a 1KW dump load when it
is already supplying 1600W to some other load. The micro should be integrating the system together.
Early in mky career I was asked to make a machine run faster. I made a number of improvments and the machine
"ran" twice as fast. As part of the modifications I added counters and timers to get more dats. What I found
shocked me. In a 12 hour work day the machine actually only ran about three hours. It didn't really matter how
fast the machine ran, production would only be improved if the material handline aspects were addressed.
RE is at that point right now. A little focus on saving a few hundred watts heating water when a thousand is lost
somewhere else. Scheduling energy usage and communication between devices will be the future.