ECE.04R – SPIM
Team Members Heading link
- Zaman Khimani
- Nikhil Nair
- Minh Nguyen
- Vedant Patel
Project Description Heading link
In today’s day and age, the demand for renewable energy is at an all time high, whether that be through solar energy, wind energy, or hydropower. As such, electric vehicles have become extremely popular in recent years, which necessitates the need for electric car chargers. Engineers for a Sustainable World at UIC built their own car charger that is solar powered. This is an environmentally effective solution, but the charger itself has its own problems. The charger tends to fail and subsequently raises an audible alarm, but gives no indication of what went wrong. Our device monitors and logs the conditions of the charger that led up to failure. These data points include the temperature of air intake, the temperature of the charger, and the charger’s battery level. This data can lead to changes that improve the charger. When failure occurs, the device alerts any users in proximity that the car charger is not functioning through an LED, so they know whether the charger is usable without having to test it themselves. This LED also indicates the other states of the charger, such as charging and ready to charge. Along with this, our device turns off the charger’s inverter if the battery level drops too low, allowing the charger’s battery to recharge using its solar panels.