What to do about charging the batteries? As I am using 12V lead-acid, I could buy a commercial charger for each one. I have one of the Samlex 1215A chargers and it is a solid piece of work. They run about $120, and as I plan to have 20 batteries, that's about $2400. A benefit of this approach (example here) is that each battery is charged individually to the correct voltage for as long or short a time as necessary. And with good whole pack (high voltage) chargers running over $2000, the costs of this plan seem reasonable.
Reasonable even more so because I do not know how many batteries I will have in the end. As I understand it, the whole pack chargers are programmed at the factory with the charge parameters (voltage and current) for your pack. So if I decide I want to up it to 23 batteries, I would need to send the charger back (from Africa) to be reprogrammed. On the other hand, if I switch to lithium, I would need a new charging system anyway. (Though it may be possible to sell a bunch of 12V chargers....)
Searching around for ideas and information, I came across this thread started by Simon Rafferty, where he shares his design for a programmable buck charger. (There is now a thread about a 10kW 60A DIY charger!) I could understand it, and I figured I could risk a few hundred dollars in parts to learn whether or not I could build one. So today I ordered parts from digikey.com, coilws.com, allelectronics.com, and from a few ebay sellers.
I already have Atmel ATmegas for control and LCDs for display. It's the power components with which I am not familiar, primarily the inductors but also the IGBTs.
Waiting for parts....
