Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
11 Stand Alone Solar Powered LED Streetlight
 Collin Hasken
Xiaolou Huang
 Kexin Hui design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
presentation0.pdf
proposal0.pdf
Xiaolou Huang -- xhuang61

Patrick Wang -- pjwang2

Collin Hasken -- chasken2

Problem: In some area in the US/around the world it is difficult to have access to the power grid. Instead of having a power line pulled across the entire road to power up a few street lights, we could place stand alone streetlights that will operate itself independently.

Idea: Our goal is to design a stand alone streetlight that will power itself through sunlight (Solar Power) and store the energy for later use (at night). Lithium-ion batteries will power LED lights that can produce 3000+ lumen. Battery status and customization will be available through a mobile app on a bluetooth connected smartphone.

Things we have considered:

Power & Battery Capacity:
To produce a 3000+ lumen light source, the power dissipated will be roughly 35-40W. Assuming there is no sunlight for two days straight, we will need roughly operate 20 hours (2 nights of 10 hours), a total of roughly 60000mAh. The battery capacity we choose will therefore be of this value. This capacity is quite large, and therefore we plan to use Lithium-ion battery. Possibly 3 cells in series and multiple in parallel.

Solar Panel:
We have looked up a few commercial solar panels and most of them provide a power of 100W, if voltage of battery is at ~12V, we will have a maximum charging current of roughly 8A. The average amount of daylight per day is 4 hours (max power) and therefore we can generate roughly 30000mAh on average, (when the battery is depleted).

Circuit Components:
Charging Circuit (Charging IC, etc.) - for charging the battery
Fuel Gauge - For measuring the battery voltage, capacity, etc.
Boost/buck converter - to produce a steady DC voltage (12V) for the LED (load)
Microprocessor - To communicate with Fuel Gauge and the bluetooth IC.
Protection circuit - Preventing charging/discharging current of batteries to reach maximum values

User Interface:
An app will be created for smartphones that will communicate with the bluetooth chip. The app will send a request for the current battery status when opened, every 5 minutes while the app is open, and when a refresh button is pressed. The app can switch the lamp from auto detecting when to turn off, to always off, to a set schedule to be on/off.

Wireless IntraNetwork

Daniel Gardner, Jeeth Suresh

Wireless IntraNetwork

Featured Project

There is a drastic lack of networking infrastructure in unstable or remote areas, where businesses don’t think they can reliably recoup the large initial cost of construction. Our goal is to bring the internet to these areas. We will use a network of extremely affordable (<$20, made possible by IoT technology) solar-powered nodes that communicate via Wi-Fi with one another and personal devices, donated through organizations such as OLPC, creating an intranet. Each node covers an area approximately 600-800ft in every direction with 4MB/s access and 16GB of cached data, saving valuable bandwidth. Internal communication applications will be provided, minimizing expensive and slow global internet connections. Several solutions exist, but all have failed due to costs of over $200/node or the lack of networking capability.

To connect to the internet at large, a more powerful “server” may be added. This server hooks into the network like other nodes, but contains a cellular connection to connect to the global internet. Any device on the network will be able to access the web via the server’s connection, effectively spreading the cost of a single cellular data plan (which is too expensive for individuals in rural areas). The server also contains a continually-updated several-terabyte cache of educational data and programs, such as Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg. This data gives students and educators high-speed access to resources. Working in harmony, these two components foster economic growth and education, while significantly reducing the costs of adding future infrastructure.