raspberry pi project to to measure a solar panel power generation

[Drakenstrijder]

hoi does anyone know what kind of device is needed to measure a pocket solar panel with a raspberry pi, in addition, the solar panel must feed an LED lamp. this is for a school project

[trag1c]

I've never really used the PI much outside of a portable computer scenario so I don't know what HATs are available or whatnot so I will give you a more electrical engineering answer.

 

Assuming you want to measure wattage you will need a current sense/shunt resistor. These are extremely low resistance but precise resistors that allow you to use Kirchhoffs voltage laws to measure the current flowing in the circuit. You're basically measuring the voltage drop across the resistor and measuring the supply voltage to calculate current so that you can calculate system wattage. 

 

I've never really used/looked into the GPIO/ADC's much on the raspberry pi but I doubt they are capable of reading the extremely low level signal that is the voltage drop across the shunt. So you will also need an amplifier to bring the signal to a level that can be read by the ADC on the PI. 

[akio123008]

6 hours ago, Drakenstrijder said:

hoi does anyone know what kind of device is needed to measure a pocket solar panel with a raspberry pi, in addition, the solar panel must feed an LED lamp. this is for a school project

For a "pocket" solar panel I wouldn't use a raspi. There's no point measuring a solar panel if the measuring device uses up all the power you produce (or even needs an auxiliary supply)

 

You'd be better off with a small microcontroller instead.

[akio123008]

54 minutes ago, James Evens said:

Yes and no. It is for a school project so use what you know.

It's not like it's easier with a pi. You'd be using very similar code and circuitry. Actually I'd argue this is far easier and quicker to set up on an arduino than on a raspi.

 

Oh BTW with microcontroller I did mean development board like arduino or something similar. I agree a bare microcontroller is too much of a hassle.

[Freakwise]

On 9/7/2021 at 4:32 PM, Drakenstrijder said:

hoi does anyone know what kind of device is needed to measure a pocket solar panel with a raspberry pi, in addition, the solar panel must feed an LED lamp. this is for a school project

I don't think you need something as powerful as a pi to just log a power usage

 

You can do that with Arduino or if you need more computing power (for whatever reason) there's esp32, stm32 blue pill or the pi pico

 

 

 

[artuc]

Use a sensor module with an interface like i2c, SPI etc

 

Such as:

 

https://www.dfrobot.com/product-1827.html