ITP Blog

Energy

Solar Project

The most valuable and meaningful thing about solar energy and harnessing it to generate electricity is how readily available (considering the normal weather conditions) it is and how environmental-friendly it is, but something I personally like about it is the fact that my project can be less dependant on an external device (a power supply). Although technically, the sun (or the solar panel) in this case is the power supply.

The solar project was all about running some sort of computation using the solar panel that we had. And I wanted to be as minimal as possible, the arduino nano iot was not minimal enough for me so I decided to go even lower and use the Attiny85 as my microcontroller. I also had a 74HC595 shift register IC. I hooked up the AtTiny to my nano IoT and used the nano as a programmer for it. I need three digital out pins which the AtTiny has, one for data one for latch and one for the clock. The way the shift register works is that first we write some bits through the data pin, and while the clock is running to synchronize the shifting of the data, we turn latch on and off to shift the bits to the output. My first idea was to make a neopixel like strip of LEDs and light them up in patterns. Although the code for this bit was simple, I decided to go further and wanted to make a simple binary calculator. But now after hours of messing with the shift register I'm not even sure if this is the best tool to make a calculator with. I may need to clear the memory because the 74HC595 keeps the previous data in memory until it is shifted to the output, which makes the process much more complicated. But as far as running computation using a solar panel, this project was successful! To go further I think I want to expand it and make a counter or a calculator. I used the energy cart since it was rainy and not much sunlight was available outside.