Week #3 Post

Our group knows that the answer to all our questions lie in the (yet to be seen) hardware. Since it's already Week # 3 the group knows it's going to be a creative and fast-paced environment for the construction of our solar panel design! What's exciting the group the most this week is that everything is starting to come together. When we sit down we draw up diagrams and have ideas of how the PC is going to communicate with the microcontroller which will send a signal to the relay to turn on a fan.We are considering putting a fuse on the fan(AC load) line to  ensure that a voltage spike doesn't blow up the fan. The group is also considering adding  micro controller to see the effects of different AC loads. We can say with confidence that we have half of our communication already done. We know that we can communicate with the system via LabVIEW. The only thing that we need to know now is a little bit more information on the meterbus communicating with the PC. I (Mike) plan on handling that by contacting Morningstar and figuring out how it communicates exactly. Also we decided it might be a good idea to draw up the model in Auto CAD and or Microsoft Visio to give a more visual idea of what we are doing. Being in Group # 6 is awesome. Everyone is inspired by their work and are constantly thinking and executing on the next big idea.