Week 6

From week 5 I have a bare circuit diagram. This week I am working on the regulator part of the circuit. I will be using an LM 317 voltage regulator. It should be adjustable as the three batteries need different currents. There is an adjustable regulator circuit on the LM 317 data sheet and I am researching this to see if it will work.

Week 5

At the end of week 4 I started to design the the charging circuit using Cadstar on the lab pc's. When the circuit is complete I will write the VB code and build the circuit on a breadboard for testing. If this goes well the circuit will transferred to a printed circuit board.

Week 4

The finished project will enable a user to charge a battery and monitor the charging process from a pc. To do this I will need the following

• User interface
• Analogue to digital converter:  
• Temperature sensor:  
• Charging circuit:                              
• Current regulator:  

These may be subject to change as the project moves along

The user interface will have to be able to control the charging circuit and receive information from it and the temperature sensor. I will use Visual Basic. The parallel port on the lab pc will be used to interface between Visual Basic and the circuit. 

Visual Basic will have to receive charging and temperature information from the circuit. This is analogue data and will have to be converted to digital for VB. An ADC 0804 will be used to convert the data.

The temperature sensor be used to check the temperature next to the battery and the VB program should stop charging when it gets to a certain temperature. A thermistor can be used for this. 

The battery needs a steady level of current to charge it so a current regulator will be needed to control it.

Week 3

This week I have decided to come up with a block diagram for the whole system.

The red arrows indicate current or voltages flowing and the blue arrows represent data.

Week 2

The Battery reference book appears to be a good source of information for charging batteries. Lecturer Ray Manley has provided some batteries and two solar panels from the lab. Here is an image of the batteries. The larger one on the left is a lead acid battery, the middle is a nicad (nickel cadmium) and the third an nimh battery (nickel-metal hydride battery). 

Rechargeable Batteries

Next we have an image of the 2 solar panels. They appear to be damaged but I could not say for certain as I have never held or used one before. I will investigate it further at a later stage.

Solar Panels

The panels are very interesting and even attracted a few questions from other students when they seen the panels on my desk. The solar power aspect of the project was one of the reasons I chose this project so hopefully I will successfully incorporate them into the design.

Week 1

Hi
I am Aidan Devlin, 3rd year Electronic and Computer Engineering Student at the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown, Dublin, Ireland. My project supervisor is Raymond Manley.

My project is a monitored battery charger. The overall aim is to investigate the issues charging batteries using mains and solar power. It will be capable of charging batteries and capturing charging information via a parallel data interface. The information should then be displayed on a pc.

I will attempt to produce a circuit that can charge batteries and display information on screen via the parallel port. If that is finished in time I will begin to investigate the use of solar panels to charge batteries.

Ray Manley has given me my project brief and my first step is to go to the ITB library and research battery charging. In the library I found the Battery Reference Book by T. R. Crompton. It contains details on most different battery types and the methods used to charge them. I will first use the book to choose some battery types to charge and to investigate how a battery is charged.