Week 1 (20th April week)

During week 1, we went in depth on the telemetry side of SunSpec4. We looked into the different important parameters that we have to attain data for our telemetry side.

The parameters were namely:

1. Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) current from 3 different strings of solar cells

2. Battery current and voltage

3. Motor current from 2 motors

4. System voltage

5. Speed of the solar car

6. State of Charge (SOC) of the battery

Alongside with these parameters, we have output displays that gave us the data for the above stated parameters. The output for these are mainly the driver LCD display, RF modem for wireless transmission of live data logging and SD Card for input data logging.

As such, with all this information, we had our block diagram that consisted of the different parameters needed and the output for the data logging.

Following up from the previous years of SunSpec3 and SunSpec2, for our MCU in SunSpec4,  we will be using Arduino board too. This is because not only it is user friendly, it is also interface friendly for us to use different electric components that aided us to attain the data parameters for the solar car.

With that, we moved on to research on the uses of the Arduino boards and we started our hands-on for the following week.