Advantages of using a Microcontroller for a battery operated CFL light

Hi,

I am considering using a micro-controller for a CFL based battery operated light. The light system will consist of the following parts.

1. CFL Light
2. A re-chargeable sealed lead acid battery (12 V ).
3. A charger (in-built).
4. An oscillator circuit for generating the 50Khz waveform required to drive the CFL.

I have considered using the micro-controller for the following jobs.

1. Generation of the 50Khz waveform , I may settle for a higher value to eliminate flicker.
2. A charging monitor to monitor the battery charger.

Kindly advise whether the mcu would be justified for the above jobs, also I are there any advantages of using an mcu instead of dedicated hardware.

Please also suggest any other ideas/modifications to the above scheme.

thanks
arunb

I don't know if they're any benifits of using a microcontroller for the CFL inverter controller, you might get better efficiency using a specialist IC. 50kHz is more than high enough in fact 1kHz would be high enough but the transformer would be much larger.

Asuming the micro controller would be cost effective compared to the discreete component sollution it could work very well. micro controllers have dropped in cost and increased in performance multiple orders of magnitudes. If you chose an appropriate micro controller you may be able to add value features due to un-used resources on the micro controller. For example the CFL oscilator could be driven from a single PWM output at 50,100,200 or more khz with only a single timer. The battery charge monitor circuit could be done using only a couple channels of ADC. This can be done with even an 8pin micro controller. However codeing and debugging the setup could become expensive. an MCU setup basically requires a little more money upfront but less cost in the long run, asuming you don't have to constantly update your software.

3. A charger (in-built).
4. An oscillator circuit for generating the 50Khz waveform required to drive the CFL.

Click to expand...

You could concider buying a small 50W inverter for driving a CFL lamp. They are pretty cheap these days. Then control the inverter's power source (On/OFF/Low voltage shutdown etc) and the charging scheme with the micro.