Solar-car control and measurement

• Student: Saravana Kannan (2005)
• Purpose: Acquire data for visualization and driver display on a solar car, and use the data to track the peak power point for the solar array.
• Method: A microcontroller measures voltages indicating the current status of the battery, solar cells, and car speed. It reports that information both to an LCD display for the driver and via a ham radio to a base station. It also uses the information to keep the solar array at the peak of its power curve. The base station stores the data streams for simultaneous or later display in a graphical tool.
• What the student learned
  1. Tools: Ham radio (he got a license!), Gtk+
  2. Techniques: Embedded programming, designing Gtk user interfaces.
  Code and documentation can be found at this site.