Arduino Micro Controllers: Many uses for Solar and other alt energy systems

WillWinston

I am not sure if this fits here .....


But I just found out about Arduino micro controllers

link here

http://arduino.cc/en/


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The Forum has grown from 72,000 users in mid March 2012 to over 113,000 members today -- explosive growth

http://arduino.cc/forum/


The power of these devices is amazing and programming them is reasonable (there are literally hundreds of programs on the net for free to download)

cost -- they start at about $25 (and they are cheaper on ebay because the whole thing is open source.)

I know that there are many technically savvy folks here that can think up hundreds of uses for these micros around alt energy problems to make life easier and the systems more efficient

I have several ideas already -- hydrogen alarm for the battery room, temperature read outs, wireless monitoring of the system so you don't have to walk 'way out there' in the middle of winter to know things are OK, internet interfaces so that you can monitor things while on vaction, a micro controlled windmill to match energy havested by turning on or off coils to match wind speed, turn on a pump to circulate water when the collector is hot....

I you were so inclined I think one could cook up an MPPT charge controler for less than $100


Check it out

stephendv

Re: Arduino Micro Controllers: Many uses for Solar and other alt energy systems

The arduino's are nice little tools- I used one to remotely control my generator and water pump over SMS before I had the solar system install. I think the biggest advantage are the huge number of add-on shields and the large user base. For a good plug and play system where you avoid soldering, have a look at the Electronic brick and Grove system from these guys: http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/grove-starter-kit-p-709.html?cPath=138

But there have been some advances in this area that make the arduino less attractive. Firstly, there's still no stable ethernet connection for the arduino. There are a bunch of different shields available but none of them can guarantee a long stable connection. Some of the howto's suggest resetting the board and shield every X hours to make sure it works... this seems like a less than ideal solution.

There are now a number of different .NET microcontrollers available. The big advantage of these is that you can write code in a higher level language like C# and you can debug it in an IDE! Debugging on the arduino through print statements out of the serial port is less than fun.

Then there are the newly announced low cost and low power ARM boards like the www.raspberrypi.org and the newly announced competitor from VIA: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404770,00.asp These are full fledged computers with built in video, audio and ethernet running a real linux OS with huge amounts (relatively speaking) of RAM and storage. All for about the same price or slightly more than an arduino.
Connecting one of these to something like the http://www.phidgets.com/ system would be more expensive than the arduino route but would be so much more flexible and powerful.

I'd still consider arduino for simple logic control and remote sensors, but for anything that requires more than a few lines of software I'd strongly consider one of the low cost ARM boards. Wonderful toys all

wrdaigle

Re: Arduino Micro Controllers: Many uses for Solar and other alt energy systems

There arduinos are great. They have a huge following, so getting help via the forums is pretty easy. I'm in the process of building a data logger for my outback system. I have an Ethernet module, so I'm hoping to post real time data to the web eventually so I can monitor the system remotely. I will post the post the code and parts list when I'm a little further along.

WillWinston

Re: Arduino Micro Controllers: Many uses for Solar and other alt energy systems

I think this is just the start

I can see that the level of performance and the ease of use will continue to get better following Moore's law


I have a GPS and stepper motor drivers running already


It is really exciting to see this level of power becoming available to us at such a low cost -- which will no doubt continue to go down

I compare this to the first calculators in the 70's that cost hundreds of dollars for the most basic model -- now they are virtually freebees

Sooooo about that MPPT controller idea...........

Photowhit

Re: Arduino Micro Controllers: Many uses for Solar and other alt energy systems

WillWinston wrote: »

...following Moore's law....

A scrap I understand, is it just the dollar's decline or some fire in an asian factory, but does Moore's law still exist, it's been 2 and a half years since I purchased 2 - 1TB 3.5" external HD's for $55 each new and I still can't find them at that price. Paid the same for 2-500GB 2.5 HD's at the same time and still haven't seen that value until recently.

WillWinston

Re: Arduino Micro Controllers: Many uses for Solar and other alt energy systems

I remember reading about the hard drive thing -- it seems that the 2011 floods in Thailand shut down some major factories that produced HD

Overall I think Moore's law has been going apace

I certainly think it will apply to these new micro controllers for the foreseeable future
From my corner of the universe I have watched microprocessor controler laboratory instruments progress for the last 30 years

The first ones were very time/labor intense -- requiring tons of programmer time and EE resources

these arduinos and others are break through technology to offer processing power to average folks

grif

Re: Arduino Micro Controllers: Many uses for Solar and other alt energy systems

WillWinston wrote: »

Overall I think Moore's law has been going apace

Just cause I think this thread needs to stay alive. Don't forget, the Arduino is a way different device than the raspberrypi. Use the Pi device to control and report from the Arduino. Just let the Pi worry about such things as wifi, ip, user interface and all those sorts of things. Let the Arduino take care of polling inputs, doing A/D, scaling data and that sort of thing. The other great thing about the Arduino,,, and I'm not so happy about saying good things about radioshack, they have spairs on the shelf.

Having been bit many times in the past. LOTS of isolation on the remote inputs, and even on the device power and ground.

inetdog

Re: Arduino Micro Controllers: Many uses for Solar and other alt energy systems

grif wrote: »

Just cause I think this thread needs to stay alive. Don't forget, the Arduino is a way different device than the raspberrypi. Use the Pi device to control and report from the Arduino. Just let the Pi worry about such things as wifi, ip, user interface and all those sorts of things. Let the Arduino take care of polling inputs, doing A/D, scaling data and that sort of thing. The other great thing about the Arduino,,, and I'm not so happy about saying good things about radioshack, they have spairs on the shelf.

A device (and operating system) which is appropriate for process control has to make some very basic architecture decisions in a different way from that used for a general purpose workstation or even server.

And Arduino devices are available from more than just RadioShack, of course.

nsaspook

Re: Arduino Micro Controllers: Many uses for Solar and other alt energy systems

The raspberrypi and the Linux kernel in general provide the basics of a very good general digital I/O and analog interface subsystem. If you use the SPI/GPIO interface on the PI it's possible to have very fast access to all the standard microcontroller module functions using standard Linux device drivers.

http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/gpio.txt
http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/spi/spi-summary

A PI board with a external Gertboard (also in non-kit form) is a good way to get started. http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/17/gertboard-extender-for-raspberry-pi-ships-to-advanced-tinkerers/
I have some example code of a diy DAQ board and general PI I/O information here. https://github.com/nsaspook/daq_gert