Pic12F675 serial voltmeter

[GioppY]

So it serialy outputs the monitored voltage continuously?
Looks great for keeping an eye on a solar installation when you can't
really keep an eye on it.
Art.

Yes; every second.
Regards

[GioppY]

I have modified the vb6 program that receive, display and plot the battery voltage.
If someone want play with it, source code and BattMonitor.exe are attached.
Improvement and bug fix are welcome.
I use it with true serial port (com1-2), i do not know if it works with usb serial adapter.
Regards
Gianni

[Art]

Thanks a heap,
I'll give it a go as my solar installation becomes more developed.

[Art]

Improvement and bug fix are welcome.

Idea for improvement, I see GPIO 1 & 2 are free, so why not set GPIO1 as output
and switch it high if the solar panel voltage suddenly drops to say... zero.
You could call that status bit ALARM!
http://www.wind-sun.com/ForumVB/showthread.php?t=1611
Or I'll simply do it myself when I get motivated
Cheers Art.

[GioppY]

Yes that is possible.
Please note that the voltage measure implement a digital low pass filter, so the response is smoothed.

http://www.wind-sun.com/ForumVB/showthread.php?t=1611
Cheers Art.

IMHO a simple micro switch can do the job.

Regards
Gianni

[Art]

It would be harder to produce a constant voltage to satisfy your program if panels go missing than just cross two wires,
and it costs zero dollars if you're already using your circuit, and I could forget about loop back wires.

[Art]

There's a book called PIC Microcontroller Project Book by John Iovine that is all about
Pic BASIC projects. The last project in the book is a solar tracker that works with two
cds cells with a plate mounted vertically between them which casts a shadow over one
if a solar tracker isn't pointing the whole assembly directly at the Sun.
Then a picBASIC program makes adjustments to the traker to equalize the readings of
each cds cell so the solar panels on the tracker end up pointing at the Sun.

Anyway, I think you could use two of these circuits with a bigger pic to achieve the same
thing with two identical soalr panels or arrays.