Development of Photo-voltaic Using Micro Controller 16F877A

Monday, 23 December 2013

This week is the crucial week whereby on Friday (20/12/13) will be our campus Industrial Day where I will presenting my Final Year Project to my appointed assessor.
I need to present about the whole system for my project. To ensure both assessor and visitor understand about my project function, so I decide to explain by using flowchart because it can explain whole of the system. After that, I need to demonstrate project function which how the solar tracking working and monitoring system functioning.

Figure 1 : Poster for presentation

For this week, I have to design the poster about whole project background to make people clearly about the project function (shown as Figure 1). In the poster, I put a few explanation about the project such as :

Poster is design to make sure the people look this project can understand how the project function. This poster consists of project introduction, project objective, methodology, result & analysis and conclusion. The result will describe about the value of power that generated from solar panel and also table solar panel angle .

As the conclusion the poster is the most important thing to describe about our project. When the assessor read all the data and information on the poster it will give them satisfaction and just ask when they don’t know certain about the project.

For this week, i just focusing on continue study about Visual Basic.
After doing some research for a couple of weeks, now I able to design an application using VB 2010.
The application are shown on Figure 1
Next step, I will continue my research on interfacing the VB application with the main circuit (micro controller).
The next step will involve programming.

FIGURE 1 : Visual Basic Application for Monitoring System

FIGURE 1 : DC Geared Motor

For this week, I need to solve the motor problem in solar tracking part. After referring to some of my lecturer (including my FYP advisor), I were advised to use bigger motor for my project. In order to support the weight of solar panel (around 2.7 kg) I need to used bigger torque. The torque of previous motor is 0.784 Nm ( click here ).
After do some research, I had found the suitable motor for my project on the cytron website, a DC geared motor with bigger torque ( 1.9 Nm) . ( click here ).
This DC Geared Motor ( SPG50-180K ) is more powerful than the previous DC Geared Motor ( SPG30-200K ). It can stand the weight of the solar panel.
Here I attached a working solar tracking testing video.

In this week I will start working on the monitoring system part. For monitoring part, I need a software that can be programmed in order to display the data that transfer from micro controller. So, for my project, I will use Microsoft Visual Basic 2010 to display the value of voltage, current and power which measured from solar panel and also voltage from battery.
Microsoft Visual Basic can be used to develop console and graphical user interface applications along with window forms or WPF application, website, web application and web services in both native code together with managed code for all platforms. The integrated debugger works as a source-level debugger and a machine-level debugger. Other built-in tools include a forms designer for building GUI applications, web designer and database scheme designer. Built-in languages include C/C++ (via visual C++), VB.NET (via visual basic.NET) and C# (via visual C#).