Ashley's Week 13 Report

This Week:  Andrew and I spent quite a bit of time last Tuesday working on trying to get the desired values read from our energy registers after he moved everything into the enclosure.  We were unsuccessful in getting correct values, but did narrow down the problem to our shunt resistor.  I ordered another one and Andrew received it on Friday.  He was still having issues so he obtained a CT to use in its place.  This solved our problem and we were reading the desired, consistent values.  Last night, the three of us met briefly to send the values to Kevin's database.  The difference this time is that now we were sending 3 bytes of data to represent one data point as opposed to 2.  The numbers weren't very consistent, but the value did rise when we went from 1 to 2 bulbs but slightly lowered when going to 3 bulbs.  I began working on the output myself today by printing the values to my secureCRT window.  I was getting very consistent numbers but was still having the issue with the 3rd light bulb  dropping the energy value.  After telling Andrew the problem, we realized that the value was probably getting clipped so we lowered our current gain from 16 to 1.  This solved that problem and now our data points from the 3 configurations of light bulbs made a linear line.  I currently have a while loop in my program that reads and prints the active energy register to the screen approximately every 1 second.  I averaged out the values and plotted the data points for 1, 2 and 3 light bulbs again their known energy values.  I found a linear curve to fit the points and applied this to the active energy value that I was reading out.  I print out this modified value and you can see the output below.  The first set of numbers just below 200 represents the single 200W light bulb (200Ws), the numbers just below 400 are the two 200W bulbs (400Ws) and the numbers just below 600 are the three 200W bulbs (600Ws).  Kevin is meeting me shortly to begin reading the values to his database again and see if we are consistent and tweak our equations so that the linear curve still fits with the desired values.

I also created a logo for our product.  You can see the new logo on our home page.  I had a bumper sticker made with this logo so that we can place it on our enclosure.

I also began putting together the slideshow for our presentation next Thursday.

Next Week:  Kevin and I will work on transferring the desired data to his database.  The three of us will get together information for the poster since we will be presenting that on Tuesday and we will also work on the remaining documents for the end of the semester.

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SecureCRT Output
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196

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194

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198

395

396

396

397

396

394

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395

393

392

589

597

596

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595

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595