I have a single 150W polycrystalline solar panel.
I want to build arduino project to, measure Solar panel voltage, current and surface temperature.
display it on a LCD.
All this data should be saved on a SD + transmits over either Ethernet or Wifi for analysis in a excel spreadsheet.
For current a Hall probe/sensor will be used
For temperature LM35 will be used.
what should be used for measuring Panel voltage ~22V ?
Why not a voltage divider?
For current a Hall probe/sensor will be used
Plan B, measure voltage drop of battery charge/manage IC's current sense resistor.
which arduino board I should use ?
Arduino UNO or Arduino Leonardo. there isn't much difference in price.
What should be used to transmit this data over a distance of 70ft.
Hi,
I would take the arduino uno and a ethernet shield. Then you have ethernet and a micro-SD card slot. You can read the voltage with a voltage divider (two resistors in series). Be sure to take precision resistors with low temperature coefficient to get better results. For current sensing I would take something like this: http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1639866.pdf. For the temperature LM35 is easy to use.
Voltage and current of your panel depend very much on what you connect to it and of course on daylight conditions and temperature.
Elektrix
Which board depends on how you want to transmit the information. It appears all you need is 3 analog inputs, and 2 serial outputs (minimum) for the display (You can do more, but that is probably the simplest way). Knowing this, you know which pins you need to use. However if you want to do wireless transmission, I would look into either a WiFi or Bluetooth. I believe Bluetooth has a maximum range of 100m if set up correctly. I have not looked too much into how the various shields connect to an arduino, but I imagine you can get away with an UNO as long as you confirm which pins are used by what. Additionally you could just run an Ethernet cable the 70ft. Just make sure nothing requires the same pins.
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoEthernetShield doesn't mention the pins used on ardunio uno.
Pins 11, 12, 13, plus 10 and 4, same as the 2009
Arduino communicates with both the W5100 and SD card using the SPI bus (through the ICSP header). This is on digital pins 11, 12, and 13 on the Duemilanove and pins 50, 51, and 52 on the Mega. On both boards, pin 10 is used to select the W5100 and pin 4 for the SD card.
So I will need the following
Arduino UNO http://digipak.org/zencart/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=70
http://digipak.org/zencart/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=66 or
Ethernet Shield W 5100 http://digipak.org/zencart/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=170 which one I should choose ?
LM35 (can it work with wire 50m in length ? )
ACS712T ELC-30A http://digipak.org/zencart/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2&products_id=131
do I need any jumper wires ??
and also any of these 40 Pin 2.54 mm Single Row Pin Header Female http://digipak.org/zencart/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=80
drraptor:
LM35 (can it work with wire 50m in length ?
You can look in my blog for problems with LM35 and long wires:
I would place the arduino near your solar system and make the digital transmission (ethernet) longer.
Elektrix