Hello, this is my first post, I'm a computer engineering 4th year undergraduate working in sensor monitoring and deployment. Sorry about any mistakes in my post, I've been lurking for a while and I'll try and adhere to the community culture.
I'm looking into a solar regulator for a long-term monitoring deployment with a 12V 4P1S battery pack. For the solar regulator's grounding features, a lot of these controllers mention common negatives in their datasheets for their grounding schemes, and I don't really know what that means exactly. I can guess from context that the negatives of the battery pack, solar panels, and load are all connected. But does this have any benefit as opposed to floating voltages, is that how systems are isolated? Are there more benefits or downsides to this type of configuration?
Also, on an unrelated sidenote, is it normal/common for solar regulators to use buck-boost conversion for their battery power source voltage regulation?
Most automobiles are negative ground. The negative battery terminal is connected to the frame or the chassis and that becomes the common or reference point. I am guessing that also applies to solar systems.
Oddly, back a while, a few cars were positive ground ... go figure?
The regulation will be on only one leg, the other side will be straight through from the input to the output terminal. Common negative will have this on the ground side and it will regulate the high side. Common positive will regulate the ground side.
Bad example
--7805-- --7805--
| |
---+---- --7805--
| |
--7905-- ---+----