Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Measuring and Controlling DC power using a Microcontroller

Status
Not open for further replies.

Wond3rboy

Member
Hi, this is my second post (the first one not having a very good title, sorry for that). A friend of mine is working on a Hybrid Energy System. The system consists of a Solar Panel and a Wind Turbine(stepper motor genny). For measuring DC power, i have advised him to go with using a shunt for the current and a simple voltage divider for scaling the voltage within the range of the ADC. I wanted to know whether this is a good enough strategy(he's using a PIC18F4520). Since its DC, sampling frequency is not an issue


Another thing that i wanted to ask was about controlling the amount of power he is supposed to give to the load since he is supposed to accomplish energy management as well. I wanted to know whether a DC/DC converter would be suitable to use. This is the only way i've seen for controlling the DC power. Is there a better way to do this?

The third question i have here is that he intends to use one controller for measuring the power from the wind turbine and the solar panel as well as control the power output through the DC/DC converter for each source.

Thanks.
 
Using PWM and capacitors will help bring it down or to input voltage,
Using a capacitor boost converter (capacitors charged in parallel and load in series) will bring your voltage up to the voltage of all the capacitors added up,
A boost converter using PWM a capacitor and a coil can use 5 components that are cheap and will make easily 200 volts..
To measure the power I would go with a high voltage opto isolator so if the voltage drops say input is 100 volt on the led (highvoltage led) then the output through the photo sensitive device is 4 volt. 100 volt on led 2 volt out, or what ever you want just use ADC on the PIC microcontroller.
Sorry for my bad explanation hope this helps.
 
Using PWM and capacitors will help bring it down or to input voltage,
Using a capacitor boost converter (capacitors charged in parallel and load in series) will bring your voltage up to the voltage of all the capacitors added up,
A boost converter using PWM a capacitor and a coil can use 5 components that are cheap and will make easily 200 volts..
To measure the power I would go with a high voltage opto isolator so if the voltage drops say input is 100 volt on the led (highvoltage led) then the output through the photo sensitive device is 4 volt. 100 volt on led 2 volt out, or what ever you want just use ADC on the PIC microcontroller.
Sorry for my bad explanation hope this helps.

Just out of curiosity, where did you read that?
 
I didn't read it my brother explained it all to me except PWM and Caps, while we were working on his school project a coil gun...

PWM I did myself at one point, It smooths out the choppy pulses to an average voltage :D

I can find links for you


EDIT:
Forgot to mention I have used all theese methods.
 
Last edited:
I'd suggest an Allegro current sensor rather than a shunt for isolation & energy eff. purposes. A shunt can be quite lossy.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top