Hi All,

I’ve been away from this forum as an active poster for some time now due to some health and work problems.
I’m slowly going back in my old routines and I got a small challenging project involving the resurrection of a nice, two compartment wine cooler (about 21 bottles).
My preliminary troubleshooting shows that both TEC controller boards are no longer doing their job and there are a lot of missing segments in the LED display. The TECs are still performing well (using a PC PSU I had them running for less than 30 minutes and the temperature inside went down to less than 50⁰F with a 75⁰F ambient). I’m planning on using the same PSU for my rebuild. I’m using the 12V outputs from it and each TEC draws about 5A.
I decided, just to impress the wife, to replace all the electronics with my own. To keep it challenging I’m planning on doing it with as little part orders and use / recycle some of the junk I almost forgot I had.
There will be a 4x20 LCD display with or without serial backpack (“in stock”). I have different samples of different calibers of 16F series PICs on prototyping boards ready to re-wire and program.
I will be using two temperature sensors / thermostats (DS1820 / DS1821 type (“in stock”)). One sensor will be on the TEC cold side heatsink monitoring the possible TEC freeze and the other will help maintain the set temperature in each chamber.
I can easily write PBP code to drive the display, set / display temperature and so on but the only thing I’m missing is a simple, reliable, safe and efficient TEC controller.
My goal is to create a standalone module, linear or PWM (preferably), that will deal with the TEC under a master controller. I only need the cooling so this should simplify the device a little.
Some Google search got me few results but most of the good ones are only working in up to 5V.
The bottom line here is: can someone recommend the best approach to this and eventually send me some information on an actually proven working controller?

In mean time I will start exploring the PWM avenue using my learnings in this thread:
http://www.picbasic.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=18317

As soon as I get my setup and some results I will return with a report.

Thank you for your attention.

Nick