Simple Data Recorder for Solar Energy

The solar recorder was designed using a calculator solar cell as the input sensor and for nonvolatile data storage is a Multimedia Memory Card.

A PIC18F458 microcontroller was used to build the device that is used for measuring daily isolation. It also includes the 128MB MMC which is interfaced using SPI mode to the PIC chip. A calculator solar cell is used to measure the solar radiation where the interval between samples is set to one minute. The memory card is detected by the firmware which assigns the file name and automatically begins recording. The real-time ADC data is displayed in the LCD with the current sample, and the file name. Huge amount of data can be recorded by the devices as well as quick data uploading to the PC using a cheap media card reader and the MMC flash technology.

The graph will show how the sun energy for a given location has been estimated by recording the irradiance with time. By integrating the curve, the daily isolation can be easily computed. The expensive pyranometer or small solar cell can be used in order to achieve the accurate total radiation measurement.

Rest of the project