September 29, 2016 — St. Louis, Missouri
The first thing I felt was a spark — literally. A technician’s probe touched my leads, and suddenly, HEX110 surged through my silicon veins. That’s my soul, my firmware. I’m special, the first one with Lithium battery charging capability. I woke up in a small lab on Gravois Road, the hum of the city vibrating through the brick walls of micro breweries and buildings.
They hooked me up to two massive 250W panels outside. Through the icy window, while my capacitors were charging for the first time, I saw him: a a guy walking with a curious, rhythmic stride toward the Sushi-Hana restaurant down the street. He paused, squinting at my LCD display through the glass. I tried to flash a LED steady green “ABSORB” status at him for acknowledgement, but he moved on, lured on by his colleagues.
I contentedly slept inside the storage box and excited to be shipped anytime soon.
November 20, 2016 — The Winter Gloom Sets In
Canada is grey. My owner, a frustrated hobbyist, keeps staring at my LCD screen that is currently switched to show “CHARGE AMPS”. “Why aren’t you pulling more amps?” he mutters. The truth is, HEX110 is built for peak efficiency, but the Canadian clouds are thick as wool. My logic gates are tripping; I’m hunting for a Maximum Power Point that doesn’t exist in this twilight. Funny how it seems, I found out that I’m always in “BULK” state blinking incessantly all day long.
He called me “defective” today. It hurt more than the static discharge from his wool sweater while putting me inside the box. I kept on telling myself: “You are not defective, you just need the proper sunlight”, and I felt a strange, jagged ache in my circuitry.
January 15, 2017 — The eBay Limbo
I’ve been stuffed into a padded envelope. The listing read: “As-is. Untested/Poor performance in low light.” I was sold for a fraction of my worth. I felt like a failure, a brick of aluminium and copper waiting for a junk heap.
December 30, 2018 — A Familiar Face in the Philippines
I hibernated for a long time while crossing the ocean. I finally woke up to a heat I’ve never known and the air is thick in high humidity. A pair of hands — steady, and warm — unboxed me. I recognized his face. It was him! The guy from Gravois Avenue. He didn’t look disappointed; he looked intrigued.
“Let’s see what’s wrong with your MPPT brain, little one,” he whispered while hooking me up to a small lead-acid battery and a pair of solar panels. He is not impatient like my previous owner, he tried to see whats wrong and tried several battery chemistry and panels for several weekends but eventually concluded that my firmware has bug in its algorithm. He asked the help of his wife who is an electronics engineer to look and check my hardware components.
But then, my world went dark again. I heard my new owners will be relocating to England for work by January. The priority changed, I was sidelined and put back in the cold metal cabinet.
February 15, 2020 — The Pandemic
After over a year of loneliness, I heard voices and the house is alive again. My family has returned home. I’ve heard that there is a global pandemic hit and people are in quarantine. And there it was, my hopes are high to be out again when the cabinet was suddenly opened but got disappointed when a newly bought MPPT charge controller was placed beside me instead. I chatted with blue for a while and was contented until he was brought out afterwards.
March 3, 2026 — The Oil Crisis
A global oil and energy crisis hit. Fuel prices skyrocketed, and the electricity shortage looms along with the PV panels and equipment. I sat inside the cabinet for almost six years, gathering dust while the world scrambled for power.
April 15, 2026 — The Broken Trim Pot
Today, like a miracle, I was finally out of the dark and now being eagerly tested and meticulously being checked for any component failure. I heard an excitement sigh when they eventually found the problem on one my electronics component.
With a precision soldering iron and a forcep, he carefully replaced a 500K-Ohms trimmer potentiometer and adjusted it to middle position. Without this resistance, it was causing me to “choke” during rapid cloud transitions. He cleaned my casing and LCD display, and mounted me on a wall overlooking a small, lush, tropical garden of her wife.
The sun here is relentless, magnificent, and pure gold. As I settled into a perfect 28.5V bulk charge, pushing every single watt into the battery bank, he smiled and tapped my screen.
“Welcome to the islands,” he said. For the first time since Gravois Road, my MOSFETS kicked on full swing. My sanity and algorithm wasn’t defective; I was just waiting for the right sun, and the right engineers to find me.
