Development of Photo-voltaic Using Micro Controller 16F877A: November 2013

Sunday, 17 November 2013

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#).