Senior Design Projects
ECS193 A/B Winter & Spring 2023
Solar-Powered Rover
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| Adrian Rusli, Esteban Virgen, Yuan Yao | |
| UC Davis |
Project's details
| Solar-Powered Rover | |
| In most traditional schools, STEM subjects are mostly taught in a theoretical manner that students are not given adequate exposure to practical experience especially for engineering in the renewable energy field. Hence, the main objective of the project is to provide 6th-8th graders early first-hand experience in working with solar panels and learn to perform basic engineering construction, which only requires one hour of test design. Additionally, the students will learn basic car mechanism by controlling its movements remotely. | |
| The hardware team will be mainly working in designing the electrical and mechanical components of the solar-powered rover. On the other hand, the firmware team will mainly be programming PSoC 6 as a microcontroller to control and display the features as mentioned in the "Deliverable" section below. In this project, the rover will be controlled remotely by simple Bluetooth application. However, in an ideal world, a user-friendly and interactive phone application would be utilized to display the features and control the rover. Hence, the software team will mainly be designing the smartphone application and work together with the firmware team in perfecting and implementing the features in the application. | |
| The solar-powered rover is basically a space car that utilizes solar energy as a power source and moves around a planet to collect samples. In this project, the user should be able to perform an hour of test design and control the car remotely with a smartphone app. Core Features - Converting solar energy to electrical energy with the solar panel - A simple car enclosure with the K’NEX building tools - Ability to regulate and store the electrical energy - Basic car movements (Forward and backward) - Headlights (Front and back) - Showing Battery percentage by color with 2 LEDs - Remote control - Using PSoC 6 as a microcontroller Nice to Have Features - Advanced movements (Left and right rotations) - Screen display that shows the following features: a. Battery percentage bar b. Speed c. Temperature d. Humidity - Mechanical/robotic arm to grab a sample and store it in a container |
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| - Have experience in working with GUI - Programming language is based on user preferences that works best with GUI (MATLAB, Python, etc.) |
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| ********** | |
| 30-60 min weekly or more | |
| Open source project | |
| Attachment | Click here |
| No | |
| Team members | N/A |
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| N/A |