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Figure 1: The Solar Recoder with a 128MB Multimedia Memory Card. The righhand shows the input sensor made with a calculator solar cell.
Introduction To estimate the sun energy for a given location, we record the irradiance (W/m^2) with time. Figure 2 shows a sample plot of irradince with time (5mins interval). The daily insolation can be computed easily by integraing the curve. For accurate total radiation measurement, we use the expensive pyranometer. However for simplicity and cheap instrument we can replace it with a small colar cell as the input sensor. The
article shows the use of PIC microcontrolller and the Multimedia Memory Card for data storage.
Figure 2: Sample plot of Irradiance along the day. The insolation is 4777 WH/m^2. The Peak-Hour is 4.8.
Hardware Schematic The complete hardware schematic is shown in Figure 1. The MCU is PIC18F458 running at 4MHz clock. The SPI port RC2-RC5 is used to interface the MMC card. Since the memory card is +3.3V logic, we use CMOS CD4050 to translate from +5V logic to +3.3V logic. RC5 is MMC command shifted out from the MCU. The shift clock is RC3. Data out from the memory card is read back by RC4. The text LCD is interfaced to the PORTB using 4-bit mode. U2, TLV2451 is current to voltage converter. It converts the short circuit current from the solar cell to voltage signal. The output voltage is short circuit current multiplied with R5. We may adjust R5 to provide +5V full scale. The signal is tied to analog input channel 0. Channel 1 is available for thermistor input. U4 is +5V voltage regulator, the +3.3V is derived from the +5V through the use of D3 and D4.
Figure 7: When the memory card has been inserted, the firmware will assign new file name (DATA_010), begin recording, display current sample (00027) and the realtime analog inputs: channel 0, 1, and 2..
Bill Of Materials August 6,2007 16:07:56 Page1 Item Quantity Reference Part ______________________________________________ 1 1 C1 0.1 2 2 C2,C3 30pF 3 1 C4 10uF 4 1 C5 10uF 16V 5 1 C6 1000uF 16V 6 3 C7,C8,C9 0.1uF 7 2 C10,C11 0.1uF 8 3 D1,D3,D4 1N4148 9 1 D2 Calculator Solar Cell 10 1 D5 1N4007 11 1 J1 CON10AP 12 1 J2 16x2 Text LCD 13 2 J3,J4 CON2 14 1 J5 MMC SOCKET 15 1 J6 +9V DC input 16 3 R1,R2,R5 10K 17 2 R3,R4 4.7k 18 1 U1 PIC18F458 19 1 U2 TLV2451 20 1 U3 4050 21 1 U4 LM2490 22 1 Y1 4MHz