As written in the previous post I am going to use the Pentametric Battery Monitor to measure the current in/out of the batteries. This means that I need to move the control of my monitor system from nRF24LE1 to a more powerful board with more than one serial port. I have thought about this and have made up my mind to use an xmega micro controller from Atmel. Mainly because I have used the AVR micro controllers in several projects in the past and that the xmega have many serial ports (USARTs). The ATxmega128A1 found on the xplain evaluation and demonstration kit has eight (!) USARTs. Pictured here is the xplain board connected to an nRFgo board via SPI:
Xplain and nRFgo boards
Below is a basic diagram of the new system. On the USART on xmega side I will use MAX3232 RS232 Transceivers and on the SunSaver (SS) MPPT side I will use the Morningstar PC Meterbus Adapter that converts the SS RS485 bus to RS232. The Pentametric use a similar converter, the Bogart PM-100-C.
Basic block diagram of new system
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Hey! Where did you get your Xplain kit, the atmel website says they are not for sale.