Åkes' Palm PDA based fuel cell analyzer
A year ago I bought a MELD device (http://www.execpc.com/~fdeck/meld) just for the hell of it and used my Palm and a C compiler (PocketC, http://www.orbworks.com/PalmOS/) to help me endure boring meetings. When the 60 days of trial had expired I did not get myself to buy the license until Christmas eve 2001. Then I spent an evening or two to write a SW that plots the measured values over time, a strip chart recorder. I made two versions of the SW, one for the MELD and another one for the ParaCube.
The SW will be added here some other day, the ParaCube code is found on an adjacent page, the Paracube page
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The MELD has a 12 bit 4 channel AD converter that measures 0 to
2.048V. The resolution (0.5mV) is not enough to run a fuel cell directly so a
small pre-amplifier
was used to boost the output. A description of the
pre-amplifier can be found here (equations
do not look good in HTML (-: ).
The picture shows the Palm, the MELD, and pre-amp in a box as well as a fuel cell. |
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Opening the box we find: The pre-amp is to the left, the MELD to the right, and the MELD
battery pack (2*1.5V) top middle.
The MELD is a PIC16C773 with 4 on chip 12 bit ADC channels. (PIC info on www.microchip.com)
Yes, it is just as trivial as it looks, the trick was to find the op-amp that could do the job, see the design page. |
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Since it was good fun and someone became interested I immediately did another one a bit better packaged and traded it with a nice piece of deco SW for the Palm, www.decoweenie.com: |
Last modified 2002-01-14
All material on this website is copyright 2002 by Åke Larsson. All rights reserved.