Is an Arduino the correct choice for the data collection of my project?

Projects General Guidance
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Brief introduction, my name is Nick. I am a college student conducting undergraduate research at a public university.

I am attempting to gather data that measures the voltage, current, and solar irradiance of a photovoltaic solar charging station. I want to collect data in order to measure the efficiency of several parts of the solar charging station.

If I understand correctly, voltage, current, and the solar irradiance data are all analog measurements. If I wanted to collect 9 different data measurements (4 voltage measurements, 4 current measurements, and 1 irradiance measurement) from 3 different sensors, would an Arduino (Arduino Mega) with enough analog input pins be able to collect/recieve all of this data? All I want to do is take the data measurements and log them in an excel spreadsheet so that I can calculate efficiency. Is an arduino the best option for this Data collection, or should I look into a Raspberry Pi or other data collection device?

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Thanks!

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  1. How much data and how often and for how long?
  2. You will need other components ofc.
  3. No mention of resolution required.
  4. Voltage and current range?
  5. LUX range?

A raspberry Pi will not help, if anything it may make matters worse.

This is a very do-able project if planned right.

A Mega has 16 analog pins...so fits your needs well in that respect.

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A Mega has 16 analog inputs so it should be very suitable unless you need a very high number of samples per second. The details will be in the Atmel datasheet for the 2560 MCU.

The Mega can also send the data to a PC for analysis.

The Mega does not have much SRAM for data storage. If you are not uploading the data to the PC all the time you might need an SD Card on which to store it.

...R