Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The material used in it should not be too much expensive otherwise there
would be no use of making it at home by going through all the trouble, can just buy
a cheap one from market instead. Therefore it should not be expensive.
The auto transformer used has 4 additional tappings set at 165V, 190V, 215V
and 240V, all with a difference of about 25V.
output in case of low and high cut modes. Relay interfacing with
microcontroller is very easy.
VOLTAGE
VOLATGES
REGULATOR SENSING
OF
INPUT
First of all, a bridge rectifier is used to convert the input AC voltage into DC
voltage, followed by a large capacitor which smoothes out the DC voltage.
And by using a voltage divider circuit we step down the DC voltage so that
the microcontroller can accept it. After long speculation and
experimentation, the ratio for the resistors of voltage divider circuit was
chosen to be (47k*6):3.3k. the circuit in this ratio performs better and the
power dissipation is also reduced.
A clamp circuit was connected at the output of voltage divider circuit, this is
formed by two diodes. The voltage will be clamped by one of the diodes
when it starts working in forward biased condition after receiving high
voltage. It would be approximately 5.7V.If low voltage appears at the output
of voltage divider, then the other diode starts working in the forward biased
condition and clamps the voltage by -0.7. These voltages can then safely go
to the ADC of the microcontroller. Schottky diodes can be used to improve
the clamping of voltages.
The input impedance for the ADC and the input capacitors are the two things
that can affect the proper operation of the circuit:
If the input capacitor is very large then its discharge will be slower and we
would not be able to get fast or quick response. After using different capacitors, we
found out that the capacitor of value 22uF was best suited as its response was
efficient in case of DC voltages and also ripples.
CALLIBRATION
REGULATOR
OF
AUTOMATIC VOLTAGE
For the calibration purposes, we have placed a switch in the circuit. When
this switch is activated and we reset the microcontroller, then the controller
goes to the calibration mode. This would be the only variable resistor that we
have used in the circuit and it is needed because there can be a lot of
discrepancies in various components and their outputs in the circuit. The
outputs can be affected by the tolerance in the resistors and variations in the
forward drop voltages of the diodes, and also by many other factors. We will
connect the variable resistor in our voltage divider circuit and by changing
the resistance values we can get the required output.
The variable resistor is not reliable in this circuit and under the conditions of
varying high and low voltages, we need consistency in the operation of this
circuit for longer periods of time therefore we decided to use no variable
resistor in the final product.
is pressed and calibration is done then the switch gets opened and constant
is stored in EEPROM and further operations are carried out.
After the successful calibration, we can now remove the switch and the
variable resistor from the circuit. The switch and variable resistor can only be
needed now if we want to recalibrate the circuit, otherwise they are not
required in the circuit anymore.
relays, but it cannot provide the current required to operate the relays
therefore we use transistors to amplify the value of current.
Coming to the seven segment display, the three seven segments displays
used in the circuit are switched one after the other which minimizes the pins
required to drive them. But this happens so fast that we cannot comprehend
it just by looking at them. The refresh rate is 167Hz, that is, the display
refreshes 167 times in a second. To achieve the required brightness, we have
connected seven transistors with the seven segment displays.
We have used three LEDs in the circuit also which shows the delay, low cut
or high cut or simply normal mode of the controller. This was the whole
process of making an automatic voltage regulator at home. By following the
steps correctly, we hope that you can make one at home too and you can
also modify it according to your requirements.