Newbie
Joined: 12/11/2008
Location: Posts: 2
| Posted: 10:14pm 11 Sep 2009 |
I have used a Freeduino board (based on the arduino board) purchased as a kit from HVW Technologies{
The Freeduino is used for monitoring my wind turbine(RPM, Amps, Watts, wind speed, TSR), solar panels (Amps, Watts), battery charge status(Volts, Amps, temperature, SOC%), and controlling battery charge rate(bulk, absorption, float).
All the real time data is viewed using the 4x20 LCD display. The only data that has history is Watt hour production by the turbine and solar panels which is recorded for a 24hr period. The same goes for load consumption.
Eventually I will have remote data logging through wifi but for now I use a MSI Wind netbook that I hook up to the usb on the Freeduino to do long term data logging.
All the code was written in c/c++ and I did make use of the Arduino core library. The "Arduino Language" is just a high level c/c++ library that wraps the lower level Atmel AVR c library. The Arduino IDE hides the AVR gcc command line tool chain and makes development a little easier for us non programmers.
Here is a picture taken in June 2009 of the prototype setup before I made the final pc board and enclosure.
