Our trackers are powered by the system bus rather than by the solar
input. That gives us complete freedom to do whatever we like on the
input of the trackers. It lets us do full IV sweeps without worrying
about killing the logic. We checked the input current, the output
voltage, and the output current on each of our four channels every few
milliseconds to make sure they were within reasonable bounds. There's
some protection hardware on the output (a fuse and a zener diode to
blow it) in case the software locks up before it trips the limits.

The small power modules are all in parallel. We just deal with the
high voltage transformation ratio since it really doesn't change our
performance very much. The inductors are designed extremely carefully
to handle very high peak currents without large losses. Even with a
10:1 voltage ratio and 6 amps on the input, the trackers do 97.5% at
90 watts and 98.2% at 45 watts. Most of our losses are in the voltage
drop and reverse recovery time of the output diode.

We are planning on having between 24 and 32 trackers on the vehicle.
They come bundled in groups of 4. They're actually quite similar to
the Minnesota trackers, but are designed to be a little bit more
electrically tolerant to transients and external fault conditions.