SunSPec 5 - Telemetry System

Building the mount We thought of making a mount for the dashboard solely for demonstration purposes and it will not be the actual mount used for SunSPec 5. The idea is to have a variable resistor replicating as each of the sensors that will be used for the car. When the knobs are turned, the values increases and decrease accordingly, whereby the changes will then be reflected on the dashboard. We started off with a wooden base but after some drilling and cutting, we found out that the skin of the wood flakes off easily when drilling, damaging the texture. We then proceeded with an acrylic base and bent it. We have also received 2 LoRa modules from Mr.Joe to test them out, whereby it's effective range of transmission is up to 5km within the range of sight. However, we have only tested from T1023 to the solar car workshop @ W12, and it is still working normally. Attending IOT seminar Some relevant things we have found out from the seminar were regarding Bl...

Bluetooth Module We were given out another type of Bluetooth modules, the Bluno Beetle. We were told that multiple slave Blunos can be paired up to a master Bluno simultaneously, however, turns out to be false. After some testing and research, it is found out that one master Bluno only allows up to one slave Bluno as the first slave Bluno paired up will be disconnected. One possible solution to counter the problem was through "switching" of the slaves. It is coded such that the slaves will be programmed to pair up with the master in succession while disconnecting the prior paired one. The Bluno beetle model is faster, smaller, and easier to set up as compared to the HC models, but of course, the cost is relatively higher too (around 7x the price of an HC-05). One major problem encountered when dealing with the Blunos was the disconnecting of Arduino ports. Each time the code is uploaded, the port disappears. Despite changing USB cables and Arduino bo...

Hc-05/06 Bluetooth modules Finding out the problem... Most of the week is spent on troubleshooting on the Bluetooth and Wifi modules. Both faces a similar problem: unable to initiate AT commands while in AT mode. After spending an entire week on troubleshooting, the problem has been fixed. No matter what was done, or any command's issued, none of the commands worked at all, even though the Bluetooth modules were in AT mode. It is most probably due to some settings that were done in the HC-05 that permanently binds the master and slave together, hence disabling ALL activities other than communication purposes (sending and receiving to and fro). It is likely due to either of the following two commands that blocked ALL  the AT commands: AT+BIND= 3014,11,192230           // to bind AT+CMODE=1 // Set the HC-05 to only connect with paired devices The first problem... Figure 1: Pinout of HC-05 & HC-06 During the first few days of t...

Week 3 We have finished testing the optoisolator through a different simpler circuit as of the previous one we did. Instead of trying to read the digital signal being sent through, we decided to test if the signal sent through can power up a LED connected on the HV side and be controlled from the LV side. Figure 1: Optocoupler circuit As seen from above, the LED is on and powered by the signal sent from the LV side, if we were to off the switch at the LV side, the LED at the HV side will turn off. What we are basically doing is using the signal to control our LED. We don't have a bigger load at the moment as the only motor we found isn't working. Once we have a bigger load than a LED, we will most probably test it and try to see if we can control it using a microprocessor instead of a simple switch.  We found out from Mr. Kenny, the main purpose of the optoisolator is to separate the ground of HV e.g. the Battery and the Arduino in the SunSPec, and that we a...

Week 3 & Week 4 We were tasked to work on the transmission of sensor data within the car with the Bluetooth module, HC-06 FC114, hence eliminating the need of using wiring. We are tasked to use the HC-05 FC-114 (master), and HC-06 FC-114(slave) Bluetooth module and pair them up to allow the communication of Arduino through Bluetooth transmission.  http://www.martyncurrey.com/connecting-2-arduinos-by-bluetooth-using-a-hc-05-and-a-hc-06-pair-bind-and-link/ Figure 1: HC-06 FC-114 Bluetooth Modules The HC-05 module can be used to be set as either the master or the slave, while the HC-06 module can only be set as the slave module. In this case, we will be using the HC-05 as the master and the HC-06 as the slave. To do so, pairing and linking of the modules' required. It is so that the modules will connect to each other automatically when powered up. To do so, the modules first have to be powered up and connected correctly. In this case, we are using th...

We spent some time arranging the components found from T1023 and W13 that will be useful for our project and placed them in boxes.  Figure 1: Telemetry components from W13 Figure 2: Boxes of sorted components We accidentally soldered wires onto the optocoupler board instead of headers and had difficulties removing them, where we broke some of the tracks in the process of removing the wires. We met up with our supervisors on Tuesday, we were then briefed and given the HC-06 FC-114 and RedBear Bluetooth modules to test. It is then found out that HC-06 can only be used as a slave module, whereby the HC-05 is required to be used as a master module. We went to Sim Lim Tower's Amicus Engineering to purchase 3 HC-05 FC-114 Bluetooth modules on Wednesday. We faced several problems with the Arduino IDE after trying to set-up for RedBear. >:( We are able to enter the AT mode for HC-06 FC-114 and upload the code onto the board. Whereby the LEDs on the ...

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...