Hello all,
My group and I are students who are looking to create a combination system for a project we're working on. A little background:
Our group's idea is to create a new way to gather energy from the sun and translate it to have the ability to power small electronic devices.
The idea is to use solar paneling and attaching them to window blinds which would then gather energy from the sun, which would be stored in a storage unit (battery), which would in turn have several USB outputs for the charging of small low voltage devices (ipod, phones, etc)
All this is not a terribly hard task but where we want to take our project a step up is to include a "priority charging" type method, where if we plug in 3 devices at once, our control circuity will be able to determine which device has the lowest voltage and begin to charge that device first until it reaches some sort of threshold level (lets say 4.0 volts for a 4.2 volt device) at that point, the control unit would cut power off to that device and begin charging on the second lowest charged device attached and so on and so forth.
I've read earlier posts about "measuring cell phone battery voltage" and seen a lot of good things said from people using this site so I was wondering if someone could put forth any ideas as to how we could best implement this. I've also read about Maxim IC which work as a dual input USB/AC adapter, which sounds like it'd be great to implement for our project. Even if we were to not implement a system which necessarily detects the voltage of each device, if we were to have three devices attached and tell our circuit to simply charge the first until a threshold is reached then shut off and begin charging the next one in the sequence, that would also be acceptable.
Thanks in advance for your feedback.
My group and I are students who are looking to create a combination system for a project we're working on. A little background:
Our group's idea is to create a new way to gather energy from the sun and translate it to have the ability to power small electronic devices.
The idea is to use solar paneling and attaching them to window blinds which would then gather energy from the sun, which would be stored in a storage unit (battery), which would in turn have several USB outputs for the charging of small low voltage devices (ipod, phones, etc)
All this is not a terribly hard task but where we want to take our project a step up is to include a "priority charging" type method, where if we plug in 3 devices at once, our control circuity will be able to determine which device has the lowest voltage and begin to charge that device first until it reaches some sort of threshold level (lets say 4.0 volts for a 4.2 volt device) at that point, the control unit would cut power off to that device and begin charging on the second lowest charged device attached and so on and so forth.
I've read earlier posts about "measuring cell phone battery voltage" and seen a lot of good things said from people using this site so I was wondering if someone could put forth any ideas as to how we could best implement this. I've also read about Maxim IC which work as a dual input USB/AC adapter, which sounds like it'd be great to implement for our project. Even if we were to not implement a system which necessarily detects the voltage of each device, if we were to have three devices attached and tell our circuit to simply charge the first until a threshold is reached then shut off and begin charging the next one in the sequence, that would also be acceptable.
Thanks in advance for your feedback.