SunSPec 5 - Telemetry System

At the Singapore International Energy Week (SIEW) Exhibition... There were a few booths around us, with all the polytechnics and ITE, NTU, SiT, and SUTD having their own booths. We found two notable groups which may be relevant to the Solar Car, else the course of study, Diploma in Energy Systems & Management (DESM) .  The first one's from Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP) group, which was doing an Intelligent Building Energy Management System (IBEMS), which allows automatic switching of certain equipment such as fan or aircon, according to the temperature. It also automatically slows down certain equipment with the use of variable speed drive (VSD) to reduce energy usage, when exceeding a certain percentage (e.g 80%) of the maximum quoted energy usage a building should use, hence avoiding the surpass of maximum limit and additional charges. Figure 1: NYP IBEMS System The second one's from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) group which was doing a 3-D printed Ele...

Week 2 A simple voltage sensing circuit is built by making use of the voltage divider theorem, whereby  Vout = [ {R2 / (R1+R2)] * Vin ]. We had previously experimented with this circuit where R1 is of value 980K while R2 is of value 10K, the voltage display was more inaccurate from the calculated voltage output as the accuracy was around  +/- 1V, as compared to the current accuracy of  +/- 0.4V . We begin experimenting and replaced the R1 with the value of 100K, only then did the circuit start displaying more accurate Voltage values.                     Figure 1: Voltage Divider Theorem Figure 2: Voltage Sensing Circuit The circuit is tested with a voltage output of 5V from the DC Power Supply, 4.72V is then being sensed by the circuit. Whereas for a voltage of 10V, a 9.49V is being sensed. This shows that the circuit is only accurate up to a certain extent, and can be improved.  ...

Week 2 - Small Update The optocoupler circuit is being tested as of right now using a simple circuit (pics of circuit and code to come later being edited). The optocoupler or opto-isolator works by the opto-isolator IC sending a signal from a Low Voltage (LV) circuit to the High Voltage (HV) circuit.  This allows isolation between the two circuits as connecting a HV ground with a LV circuit will result in damage to the LV circuit, so the opto-isolator is essential to avoid damage and burning of the Arduino when we test it with HV circuits later on. The optocoupler is normally used in applications such as allowing a microcontroller to control servos or other motors that use a higher voltage than the TTL logic on the (3.3V or 5V) microcontroller. Source: http://www.sgbotic.com/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=402 We tested the optocoupler using a DC power supply, a simple breadboard circuit, and Arduino to verify the signal sent from a LV circuit to a HV...