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Arduino Uno, PWM, Smoothing and more..

with ankur sarda

In the Extension of earlier work with arduino uno, In this task we are are building a circuit with photocell sensor and LED. Here we are trying to modulate the current passing through the LED using the photocell.

below is the circuit diagram.

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In above circuit, we tried with different intensity of light on the photocell sensor and printed the voltage at LED.

below are the readings.

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From above readings we plotted the relationship between the voltage and light intensity in lux.

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as we can see from above plot, the relation between voltage and light intensity is logarithmic but the curve is not a perfect fit for the readings.

we now tried to filter the voltage readings by taking the running average of latest 10 voltages values. below is the code snippet.

#include <math.h>

int photocellPin = 0; // the cell and 10K pulldown are connected to a0
int photocellReading; // the analog reading from the sensor divider
int LEDpin = 11; // connect Red LED to pin 11 (PWM pin)
int LEDbrightness; //

const int numReadings = 10;

int readings[numReadings]; // the readings from the analog input
int readIndex = 0; // the index of the current reading
int total = 0; // the running total
int average = 0;

void setup(void) {
// We'll send debugging information via the Serial monitor
Serial.begin(9600);
for (int thisReading = 0; thisReading < numReadings; thisReading++) {
readings[thisReading] = 0;
}
}
 
void loop(void) {
photocellReading = analogRead(photocellPin);

// subtract the last reading:
total = total - readings[readIndex];
// read from the sensor:
readings[readIndex] = photocellReading;
// add the reading to the total:
total = total + readings[readIndex];
// advance to the next position in the array:
readIndex = readIndex + 1;

// if we're at the end of the array...
if (readIndex >= numReadings) {
// ...wrap around to the beginning:
readIndex = 0;
}

// calculate the average:
average = total / numReadings;
// send it to the computer as ASCII digits
 
Serial.print("Analog reading = ");
Serial.print(average); // the raw analog reading

int l = (int) pow(2.71, (average - 189)/102.75);
Serial.print(" ");
Serial.println(l);

LEDbrightness = map(l, 0, 1000, 0, 255);
analogWrite(LEDpin, LEDbrightness);

delay(100);
}

Now we again noted few readings of voltage and light intensity in lux, this time we calculated resistance as well.

below are the readings.

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we again plotted the graph between voltage and light intensity.

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As we can see in above plot this time the curve coming to be a good fit.

we also tried our hand to building a proximity sensor, where we took some readings of distance of the object from sensor and the voltage on LED.

below are the readings.

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when we plotted the relationship between the distance of the object from photocell and the voltage it came out to be approximately linear.

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