MATLAB Student's Innovative Solar Cell Project Using MATLAB

[nortron]

For a junior design project i heard about a student using MATLAB to help operate a solar cell. Basically the sensors detected the light and shifted the p.v.cell into the lights direction, if you were to move light then cell would get re-adjusted. I guess my question is that I am not sure how he involved matlab......thanks for reading or even replying...

 

[MATLABdude]

Welcome to PhysicsForums!

In all likelihood, he used MATLAB to duplicate what a microprocessor (or a regular PC without MATLAB) could do with some extra programming: reading analog values (or not, if he used multiple directional light sensors), and some sort of interface to control a stepper motor.

I TA'd a group a few years back for their capstone electronics design project. They used MATLAB to control a big robotic arm, via a serial (RS-232) interface. The low-level was handled by a PIC microcontroller (reading of position sensors, low-level motor control, limit switch detection), which interfaced with MATLAB to control the high-level functionality (and provide an easy-to-use GUI--graphical user interface)