The meter now data logs everything, power input, both power outputs, input voltage, both voltage outputs, input & output current, and efficiency. When the meter is turned off, and then back on again, it begins data logging where it left off, so it never overwrites any data. That is, unless you select reset all, in ...
2010-09-12 19:58:38
Lots of bugs were fixed due to the data logging software additions, but as of last night it was looking good. Just a few more minor software changes is about it. The Hue efficiency & power meter now logs every efficiency measurement to the SD drive. Also there's a mode (pressing down on joystick) where the meter ...
2010-09-11 15:22:42
All of yesterday was spent on making the Hue efficiency & power meter linear at low levels, and also adding more software features. Wow, the efficiency & power meter is now scary linear. The software additions are going crazy, perhaps too much. They're almost finished though. One addition is a data logger, ...
2010-09-10 14:10:56
The later part of yesterday and all of today was spent on getting the Hue efficiency & power meter linear at low levels. The problem ended up being very simple. My method of setting the software offset was wrong because of the instrumentation amplifiers common voltage. For like weeks I've been battling with the ...
2010-09-09 20:17:57
Hopefully within a week I'll put together a post containing all of the code and tips so that anyone could easily get the Olimex MSP430F169 dev board with LCD screen, SC card, ADC's, and DAC's all up and running in no time with the free open-source mspgcc compiler and Olimex JTAG programmer. That should save anyone new ...
2010-08-19 23:25:57
The MCU capacitor tester now displays the capacitors capacitance. So now it shows the capacitor efficiency and capacitance. What's interesting is that the manual capacitance measurements I made 4 days ago (very rough figures) on the 40000 uF capacitor that showed the capacitor at 80% efficiency was based on the ...
2010-08-15 22:01:10
Here's a video of my homemade MSP430F169 MCU capacitor efficiency meter. First it charges a capacitor from 0 to ~ 2.5 volts. Then it discharges the capacitor. The efficiency is 100% * total energy in / energy out. The graph shows a trace of |current|. E is energy. Eff is efficiency. At first there's no current. When ...
2010-08-14 20:26:11
Playing with MCU dev board is like a kid in a candy shop. Getting the DAC's to work was too much to resist. That's right, this MCU has two 12-bit DAC's (digital to analog converters). The DAC's are comparable in speed to the ADC's. The ADC's can achieve over 500 ksps with load impedance sources. There are also several ...
2010-08-10 22:43:43
Cool! The ADC is working. This $52 MCU dev board has already far outdone any digital voltage meter I've seen. I quickly coded it to trace the ADC input voltage on the Nokia 3310 pixel screen. Hey, it's only 84x48 pixel resolution, but that's good enough for simple graphing. Also it prints the ADC voltage. So right now ...
2010-08-10 19:09:33
Finally!! I got the SD card working. It was a silly issue. Because I was so paranoid of burning up the mcu dev board, I set the power supply current max to 25 mA. I thought for certain that was plenty enough current. No, it wasn't. I'm still not sure where the current surge is taking place, but it's occurring ...
2010-08-10 01:57:11