Oh F*** NRs Solar panel has arrived and ....

[Skvez]

NR,

What rating is your solar panel?
I'll assume its somewhere around 100W

I guess it's too late today to do much testing but tomorrow you can still play…

Solar panel should have two leads coming from it. Hopefully colour red for +ve and Black for -ve.
You can connect these directly to a car brake light/side light to check the solar panel is working, I doubt you'll have enough sunlight to get the Voltage up to the point where you blow the lamp (and even if you do it's only a couple of pounds).

Tell us how many connections the charger controller has.
They usually have 6
2 for the solar panel (+ve and -ve)
2 for the battery (+ve and -ve)
and 2 for the load (+ve and -ve)

A 'good' charge controller will be obvious which connections are for what (little pictures).

If you were serious about it smoking it's probably dead

Many charge controllers must have a battery connected.
The charge controller exists to
1] Regulate the charge into the battery (so you don't over charge it)
2] Shut off the load if the battery gets too low (so you don't over discharge it)
The regulation of the load Voltage is usually left to the battery itself (so the Voltage goes up and down as the battery charges and discharges but not nearly as much as the output of the solar panel).