Ai Powered Hacking

[Kaskuser Kiss]

HelloI have 3 out of 4 sunpowered spotlights that are not working anymore.

Usually this is due to the corrosion as you can see in the pics although these spotlights are sold for exteriour use.

The red and yellow wires are the positive and negative poles of the solar pannel.

The white wire is the negative pole attached to the battery.

The positive wire of the battery that is now detached was soldered to the pcb where you can see a circle with a + and it was in series with a latching pushbutton.

The LED wires were attached to S+ and S- in the pcb (maybe)

The resistor should be connected in series with the power and the anode of the LED.

Before drawing an attempt of sckematics, what I am missing is how the LED become powered when it is dark. It is like when the sun pannels are not providing any voltage, then the rechargable battery are powering the LED. It is like the flow of current change path if a voltage is provided or not.

Or am I missing a component?

I have attempted this schematics below.

I imagined that the solar panel should have a voltage higher than the battery when it is lit by the sun.

Therfore, there are 2 circuits in parallel; one with resistance 2komh connect to the LED and one with low/nill resistance.

When the voltage of the solar panel is higher than the battery voltage, the current is flowing to the battery only due to the low resistance offer by the circuit while no enough current is flowing to the LED keeping it off.

When the voltage of the solar panel is either lower than the battery or zero, the solar panel can be assimilated to a high resistor or a break in the circuit (?) and the current flows to the LED.

But my attempt seems wrong since with no battery I should have the LED lit during the day

Any ideas?

thanks

Yes, nothing. But I am not sure why that resistor is there. Maybe I cannot see well the colours on the photo but it seems a 1k or 2k resistor.

The fact I am not sure what is the working principle of this spotlight.

How can it turn on when it is dark?

Hi AntroxEv,

Yes you can totally use the YX8018 to control when the light turns on. If the solar cell is providing no charge it is possible to detect this situation and turn on the LED. Here is a site that explains it fairly clearly.

Hacking an LED solar garden light. You can file this blog entry under exploring interesting bits of electronics hidden in everyday household items much like these two previous entries on using coin cell batteries and flickering LED candles. Solar...

kionokitse:

Hi AntroxEv,

Yes you can totally use the YX8018 to control when the light turns on. If the solar cell is providing no charge it is possible to detect this situation and turn on the LED. Here is a site that explains it fairly clearly.

In option 1 a RTC can do the job but this system assures that the operation will be carrying out at the dusk that occurs every day at different time

In option 2, it is a way to save energy without using pro mini and removal of several components

Option 1 sounds really good but I have no experience with this so I couldn't comment on if it's possible. Option 1a would probably work really well. Since sunset changes every day, you could have a variable that increases by (x) min per day until the height of summer (y) number of hours then starts decreasing by (z) min per day. You could look up these variables by looking at the sunrise/sunset times for where you are living.

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On the surface, using a power wheelchair as a robotic base seems like a no-brainer. The control modules for these chairs contain all of the necessary electronics to drive the motors, including DC/DC converters, PWM generation, and a microcontroller to govern acceleration, deceleration, and braking. Before I knew better, I purchased a power wheelchair thinking that it would be a simple task to wield the functionality of the electronics already built into the control module. However, as anyone who has attempted this knows, available documentation for wheelchair control modules is virtually non-existent.

This project began when one of my students approached me at the beginning of summer 2016 with the desire to create a robot that could roam around our department, talk to students, take pictures to post to a Twitter account, and ultimately provide a scalable robotic platform for students to build upon. Because this robot could be subjected to some wear-and-tear as a result of its frequent interaction with students and faculty, I immediately thought of using a power wheelchair as its base.

The top of the box holds the bargraph power indicator, the power button, and the joystick, along with several PCBs (printed circuit boards) which serve to interface these components to the rest of the module via a ribbon cable and a bundle of two small wires.

The dense packing of the electronics in the module was overwhelming at first. However, since the joystick is the most direct way of controlling the motion of the chair, that seemed like the most logical place to begin our investigation of the inner workings of the control module. The joystick module itself is housed in a metallic cylinder (shown prominently in Figure 2) which is mounted on the top of the control module. A bundle of five different colored (black, green, red, yellow, and blue) wires connects this module to the rest of the electronics in the box. Each of these wires fortuitously connects to a solder pad on the PCB that houses the power button and the LED indicator bargraph. Using these pads as contact points, we were able to determine the purpose of each of these wires through the use of a digital multimeter (DMM).

Our initial guess (which turned out to be correct) was that the black wire provided a circuit ground connection for the joystick module. So, we connected the ground lead of our DMM to the black wire and probed the voltages of the other wires with respect to that node. We found that the red wire was held at a constant 12V, and that the green wire was held at a constant 6V with respect to the black wire. The voltages of the other two wires varied according to the motion of the joystick.

When the stick was at rest, both the blue and yellow wires were held at 6V. However, when the joystick was rocked from fully backward to fully forward, the voltage of the yellow wire varied smoothly from 5V to 7V. Similarly, when the joystick was rocked from left to right, the voltage of the blue wire varied smoothly from 5V to 7V.

Discovering the behavior of the yellow and blue wires was a breakthrough in the wheelchair hacking process; all it takes to harness the power of the chair is to emulate the behavior of these two wires. If we could figure out a way to control these two analog voltages using a standard digital platform, we knew we would be in business.

The easiest, quickest, and least reliable way to create a variable voltage is through the use of a voltage divider. A voltage divider is nothing more than a series of resistances across which a voltage is applied. Figure 3 shows a schematic of the simplest form of a voltage divider: two resistors in series.

At this point, I just needed to find a digitally controllable potentiometer to place in my circuit of Figure 4 that could interface easily with a digital platform. There are many devices out there that seem like they would fit in this circuit just like a mechanical potentiometer would, but I learned the hard way that digital pots are not always as flexible as their physically tangible counterparts.

I chose to use a Microchip MCP4251 for my circuit (the datasheet is available in the downloads). The MCP4251 is a dual-channel SPI-controllable digital potentiometer which comes in 5, 10, 50, and 100 kW varieties. I chose to use the 10 kW version, of course, in light of the resistance values I had used in Figure 4.

Using my trusty protoboard, I wired up this simple voltage divider, and I wrote some quick-and-dirty Arduino code to communicate with the potentiometer via SPI and vary the output voltage sinusoidally. Then, I connected the output voltage to my oscilloscope, turned on the power, and watched the screen. Nothing happened.

At first, I assumed my problem was related to the SPI commands I was sending. (Did I misread the datasheet?) After double- and triple-checking, I decided that the commands should work. To check this conclusion in another way, I disconnected the voltage divider from the power supply, set my DMM to resistance mode, and started checking the resistive properties of the digital multimeter.

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