The Environmental Friendly Solar Recorder!
Since there are many people begin to pay attention to the global warming, and they’re opted to go green, it is a great chance to get you approaches with this incredible Solar Recorder.
For your information, this solar recorder is a very useful electronic gadget, which you can use it to store data to a compact flash memory card. Oh, you said that you don’t need a solar recorder here? Well, take it easy, as you still can see by yourself how the actual steps to store data to compact flash from a PIC microcontroller.
Basically, solar recorder is a handy device that can be used for measuring daily insolation. You might need to use the PIC18F458 and the 128MB Multimedia Memory Card (MMC) to build this stuff! The solar radiation is well measured by a calculator solar cell.
The PIC chip will interface the MMC using SPI mode and remember to set the interval between samples to one minute. The firmware is use to detect the memory card, assigns the file name and begins recording procedure automatically.
The LCD on the upper will display the file name, current sample, and real-time ADC data. With the MMC flash technology and a cheap media card reader, the device is able to record numerous amounts of data instantly!


