Showing posts with label light sensor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label light sensor. Show all posts

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Powerboard V1.3

This is the third iteration of the powerboard(1.3) that I've been using for work with solar cells. It was meant to be a smart version using a 2211 to monitor the voltage levels via comparator.  The other part of this project board was to also test 2 things. First, printing of the board to get an idea of the size and test the layout. Second was to test a smt crystal. Both of these objectives were reached, but...



Unfortunately there are several issues with the board, most of which can be worked around, but with the loss of designed functionality. I will admit, this is one one poor design and will need to be resolved. With this, I can actually add some new hw functionality, though I'll be doing a bit more checking next time.

Monday, August 13, 2012

While working on some TimerA related testing I decided to do a weekend run of the datalogger. This is still a single channel run until I get the multichannel code tested a bit more. This graph shows a simple light level set of readings for the weekend starting on a Friday and going through to Sunday night.
as I don't have the exact times, I believe the flat lines around the 25-35 level are from an external lamp or from the monitor. I haven't not confirmed it yet. I should hopefully have 2 channels recording this week and can start looking at light levels and temp readings throughout the days. first a simple 1 day test, then a week long test.


Monday, July 30, 2012

Wired up.

Logger wired up with the addon board. This was a quick setup with a button board, sensor board(cds connected) and just a third wired servo wire connector. I also decided to use jst power leads for the battery adapter harness(was tired of the long leads for the original connector). This is connected to an xbee for transferring the data wirelessly, and of course an LP for the programming.
The space taken by the program is currently just under 3k and I have a bit more to add...This is a bit of a concern and I'm considering using a 2453 for the last board as it'll double the amount of program space I have available. I'd prefer not to do this as I think the 4k limit I initially wanted to keep the prog within is still within reach.

Currently the updated code adds a simple header writer function that I've implemented on the single channel recording and another test mode that is suppose to record to 3 channels, though running into some difficulty.  For some reason A.0 only reads as 1024, even when connected to ground....When I figure this issue out, I'll add a blurb to this post describing the findings.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

ADC input test.


First run of the ADC10 with a simple light meter(Cds) with the results as expected. The light sensor was placed facing my computer monitor prior to my going to bed(just past 4am). So the graph shows the monitor running for a short period of time before going to a black screensaver, then eventually going to standby. This next transitions to the increase in light from the morning sun peaking through the window. The last part around the 50k mark is when I moved it closer to the window which pretty much pegged the level
Current setting of the sref is as follows( VR+ = VCC and VR- = VSS) though I may go with (VR+ = VREF+ and VR- = VSS) using 2.5v refgen to expand the range. I'm also down converting the data to 8bit values instead of using the 10bit values for testing purposes. I plan to have this as an option for the user to be able to select between. As I have a few updates that I'll be doing to the code, the current sources have not been updated yet.


This is a shot of the add-on board prior to being populated. The current setup that I'm using has a xbee and light sensor connected to ADC0. Pics to come soon.