An update on the Energy Sims World Project.


My recent work has been involved in designing schematics for two chips, the BQ25504 which takes power from micro power sources and stores them in a battery/capacitor, and the P1110 which converts Radio waves and converts it into a DC voltage, powering an onboard LED or charging a battery/capacitor.

BQ25504

The aim is to use this chip to harvest energy in the form of micro- and milli- watts from sources such as solar, wind, fruits and dead batteries. Another prospect of this board is use in education, comparing the harvested energy with the energy used by a house, or general appliances around the house.

 

P1110

This chip can be used to convert ubiquitous RF waves into a DC voltage. This chip will also be used in another project to power a wireless sensor.

MyDAQ Energy World Sim

A question I asked my physics teacher a few years ago, 'How much fruit would it take to charge my mobile phone?' While this stayed as a joke idea for a while, this project has given me a chance to finally partake in such a study. I started by injecting zinc and copper into three different sources; a lemon, a lime and a potato, and I observed the voltage and current differences using a simple Labview VI.

 The graph shows power vs time

Since the potato displayed the lowest voltage, I will focus on using lemons and limes. The above series measured approximately 1.91V and 5.77mA, giving an approximate power of 10.96mW.

This is my first video with Camtasia and it is about the progress I have made with my project. I hope you enjoy it.

Sundeep

Me and Tom made a lot of progress yesterday as one can see from the upper screenshot of the current Front Panel. We have added gauges to show how much power is created from the solar panel and how much the actual power is (the scaled area of the house panel). Also we have added some electric devices in the house to explicitly show what one can power with the actual power.

Currently one can see that with the current specification one can power the TV, the light (but only with energy saving bulbs), the laptop and a games console. If the switch is up, the device is turned on and the LED next to it shows if can be powered from the actual the area of the house panels. Once the calculated power of all these devices exceeds the generated power from the solar panels, the LEDs will turn off which then ultimately means that there is no power in your household until you have turned of some devices. 

Sundeep

Tom:
Today me and Sundeep collaborated with a goal to successfully perform data acquisitions with the myDAQ, and then to manipulate this data using labview.  Sundeep's project requires the use of a solar module with live data acquisition where as mine requires creating resources to teach others how to utilise labview, so it was natural to combine our projects to reach a common goal.

Sundeep:
The goal today was to successfully link a solar module to Labview using the myDAQ. First of all we used the DAQ Assistant in order to get the voltage of the solar module. Due to the fact that I wanted to calculate the energy, I therefore also needed the current since power is equal to voltage*current.
We then created another DAQ Assistant in order to measure the current but then we got stuck since the myDAQ can not handle two DAQ Assistants.
We then decided to ask Chuan and Maria for help and they were more than happy to help us. Their to solution to problem was to use one DAQ Assistant which can measure both voltage and current. The output was then an array which had two values. With the Index Array function in Labview it was then possible to take the individual values out of the array.
After this we multiplied voltage*current to get the power of the solar panel.

On the picture above one can see the front panel of the collaboration so far.


Tom + Sundeep