This paper presents a detailed design of portable boost converter. The input is obtained by using photovoltaic (PV) system along with the maximum power point tracking algorithm (MPPT) to pull out maximum power. The boost converter is used to increase the fluctuating PV array voltage to high constant DC voltage. ATmega328 microcontroller is used to design the algorithm and able to track the PV voltage and current with the help of sensors and provides the appropriate pulse width modulation (PWM) signal to control the MOSFET in the boost converter. The main objective of this work is to implement perturb and observe (P&O) method as MPPT to control the boost converter. A detailed hardware design of the converter and MPPT method is carried out with the very good result shows that this design can effectively realize the actual practical Boost converter. © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016.