Hi,
I need to sense the ambient light for controlling the intensity of a street flash light. Planning to use an LDR. The circuit will be in a box under the solar panel. Should I take out the LDR through wire connection and face it upwards (to avoid vehicle head lights directly falling on it).
When you say "street flash light", what do you mean?
As far as oncoming car headlights, just face it in a direction perpendicular to the direction of the headlights.
On another note, have you considered using one of these: OPT101 from Texas Instruments . I just finished building a project using one of these, for a light intensity project, and they work great. Just send the voltage to the ADC of a uController of your choice, with whatever logic you want to use.
There are many requests on these forums for inverters and crystal controlled clocks from people in India.
Their electricity fails often and the voltage and frequency vary all over the place.
The power meters are bypassed so that electricity is stolen and even the copper wires are stolen.
I wonder if you could use the solar panel output voltage for sensing also. Have you checked the output characteristics of the panel when the light is low and it is no longer charging the battery?
I wonder if you could use the solar panel output voltage for sensing also. Have you checked the output characteristics of the panel when the light is low and it is no longer charging the battery?
These handle every thing for you, just need solar panel, battery, and lights (load). Even different timing modes (16 I think, been about a year since I hooked mine up), 7 of them flash. It would be difficult to build your own, and save money.
For a solar streetlight, you are going to need some pretty bright lights, don't think LEDs will do it. If people are stealing copper wire, got a hunch a huge solar panel and battery wouldn't last very long...