IPASJ International Journal of Electronics & Communication (IIJEC)

Web Site: http://www.ipasj.org/IIJEC/IIJEC.htm

Email: editoriijec@ipasj.org
ISSN 2321-5984

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Volume 4, Issue 4, April 2016

Utilization of Solar Energy to make RF Based

Remote Control Chair for Handicapped
Sibasis Bandyopadhyay1, Subha Ram2, Soumya Dutta3, Arindam Mardanya4
1

Lecturer, Technique Polytechnic Institute, West Bengal

Project Fellow, Technique Polytechnic Institute, West Bengal

Project Fellow, Technique Polytechnic Institute, West Bengal

Project Fellow, Technique Polytechnic Institute, West Bengal

ABSTRACT
In the years to come the need for energy will increase manifold while the reserve of conventional energy will deplete in rapid
pace. To meet the growing demand of energy harnessing of non-conventional / renewable energy is the necessity. Among all the
available non-conventional sources, solar energy is the most abundant and uniformly distributed. In cities of India one of the
major medium of transportation is auto rickshaws, which is producing a huge amount of air pollution as well as greenhouse
gases like CO2. Fuel, which is used, is a non-renewable source and also which costs high as a result of that transportation
charges increases. It would also affect the economy. Thus they should go for a reliable source as know that current trend of
using the reliable source like solar which is available in plenty in country like India. This car using the solar panel, controller
and DC motor setup to convert the light energy as an electrical energy which is fed to the DC motor to obtain mechanical
motion. The system is the improved system to provide higher efficiency for lower cost. Solar powered car is the system with the
efficient utilization of solar energy designs a general purpose vehicle by charging battery using solar energy and especially
designed for physically challenged. The existing system receives maximum sun energy only from 11 am to 2 pm, because
always the solar collector kept at 30 degrees and charges a small battery. A new method is developed, where sun light is tracked
from morning 6 am to 6 pm by moving the solar collector along with the movement of the sun using stepper motor.

Keywords: Photovoltaic cells, Encoder, Motor, Decoder.

1. INTRODUCTION
If Environmental concerns keep growing, and restrictive guidelines constrain the use of the pollutant sources, wind and
solar Photovoltaic (PV) power can be considered as viable option for future transportation. Besides being emission-free,
the energy coming from the sunrays is available at no cost. As the awareness of environmental protection and energy
saving continues to rise, only the electric vehicle can realize real zero oil consumption and zero pollution. The gasoline
engine and the diesel engine (no matter how much their efficiency is improved) as well as hybrid vehicles all consume
fossil fuel, so there is still some way to go in realizing real zero emissions. Therefore, the electric vehicle with zero
emission will undoubtedly become the mainstream means of private transportation in the future. The governments of
each country and their societies have outlined large scale plans to promote battery-powered electric vehicles for
considerable opportunities to change the nature of private vehicles. This paper discusses about the solar powered battery
operated EV as an option for fuel vehicle. We make the solar car and above the car we placed a plastic chair which can
able to carry a person. We specially made it only for handicap people who are unable to move from one place to
another.

Figure 1: System block diagram

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IPASJ International Journal of Electronics & Communication (IIJEC)

Web Site: http://www.ipasj.org/IIJEC/IIJEC.htm
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ISSN 2321-5984

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Volume 4, Issue 4, April 2016

2. SYSTEM CONFIGURATION AND OVERVIEW

The flowchart helps us to understand the working logic of the car and chair. First we will go over the basic idea of the
car and the working logic that is involved in the car. There are two blocks, the Transmitter (remote control) and the
Receiver (car). On the transmitter side, we have the switches to give the digital inputs to the encoder IC. The encoder
then encodes this data and sends it to the RF Transmitter module. On the receiver side, we will have the RF Receiver
which receives the encoded data and passes it on to the decoder. The decoder decodes the data and sends it to the motor
driver IC to drive the motors.

Figure 2: Transmitter and Receiver block

1. HARDWARE DESCRIPTION
1.1. Solar Charger and Battery unit
Figure: 3show the solar charger circuit that is used to charge Lead Acid or Ni-Cd batteries using the solar energy
power. The circuit harvests solar energy to charge a 6 volt 4.5 Ah rechargeable battery for this application. The charger
has voltage and current regulation and over voltage cut-off facilities. The circuit uses a 12 volt solar panel and a
variable voltage regulator IC LM 317. The solar panel consists of solar cells each rated at 1.2 volts. 12 volt DC is
available from the panel to charge the battery. Charging current passes through D1 to the voltage regulator IC LM 317.
By adjusting its Adjust pin, output voltage and current can be regulated. VR is placed between the adjust pin and
ground to provide an output voltage of 9 volts to the battery. Resistor R3 Restrict the charging current and diode D2
prevents discharge of current from the battery. Transistor T1 and Zener diode ZD act as a cut off switch when the
battery is full. Normally T1 is off and battery gets charging current. When the terminal voltage of the battery rises
above 6.8 volts, Zener conducts and provides base current to T1. It then turns on grounding the output of LM317 to
stop charging. This solar unit is placed in the car or chair to make the supply of receiver unit. That means to drive the
motor.

Figure 3: Solar Charger circuit

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A Publisher for Research Motivation........

Volume 4, Issue 4, April 2016

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3.2 RF Transmitter and Receiver Module

In the RF transmitter and receiver modules the frequency in which they communicate should not be a problem as long
as both the receiver and the transmitter are of the same frequency. All modules are Pin and Pad compatible. But there
are some modules that have inverted numbering, like first pin will be last pin and second pin will be second from last
and so on.
3.2.1 RF Transmitter (Remote Control)
In Figure:4 shows the transmitter circuit, we have in mind that this is our remote. So we try to make it as handy as
possible. Make a good closure for this circuit. The HT12E encoder is 12 bit encoders that are they have 8 address bits
and 4 data bits. The address bits can left open or pulled low. In the circuit below, it will see that each of the address
pins (A0 to A7) are connected to a switch. So if the switched is ON then that line is connected to GND (Vss) otherwise
the pin is left floating. The TE (transmit enable) is a active low input to the IC. This enables the transmission. So when
the switch connected to pin 14 is pressed, the 8 address bits along with the 4 data bits (AD8 to AD11) are serially
encoded and sent out at the DOUT pin. For our application (RC robot car) we will connect TE directly to GND as we
have to keep sending the data as and when they arrive to the car. Unlike the receiver circuit, this does not need to have
a beefy battery. We can power this circuit with a 9V battery.

Figure 4: Transmitter Section (Remote Control)& RF Transmitter Module

3.2.2 RF Receiver circuit with motor driver
In figure:3 shows the circuit diagram of the receiver. It handles the RF reception as well as the motor drive. The
address pin in the decoder (HT12D) behaves just like that of the encoder. The data is received at the DIN pin from the
RF receiver circuit and then this data is checked 3 times (according to the datasheet the data is transmitted 3 times and
received 3 times and only if all 3 times the data is same it is decoded) and then decoded and IC checks if the address
pin connection of the encoder is same as that of the decoder. If the address configuration of the decoder matches that in
the received data (from encoder) the data is decoded and latched on to the data pins (D8 to D11).This decoded data is
then send as control signals to the motor driver IC. L293D a dual H-bridge motor driver to be short. It is used to drive
the motor in both forward and back ward direction. The VT (valid transmit) pin is used to indicate if there is a valid
transmission between the encoder and decoder. This pin can be left open or like in the circuit below, an LED with
series resistance can be used to give a visual indication.

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Figure 5: Receiver Section& RF receiver Module

4.DIFFERENTIAL DRIVE ALGORITHM

There are a lot of different types of drive algorithms for driving cars. One such method is the differential drive method.
We will be using only one pair of motors to drive the car. We have one castor wheel asides from the two motors and it
will be used to give mechanical stability to the car. Now the obvious question is how the car will change direction if it
has only two wheels. That is when the differential drive algorithm comes in the picture. The direction control is
achieved by rotating one of the wheels in one direction and the other in another direction. The following table: 1givesus
a better understanding the movement. The car will go front or back if both the pair of motors operates in one direction
and left or right if they operate in different directions.
Table 1: Motor Operation to control the movement

Left Motor

Right Motor

Direction

Front

Front

Front

Front

Back

Right

Back

Front

Left

Back

Back

Back

5.PCB WORK
We make PCB layout for the above two circuits. We make it by using eagle software and printable PCB art works done
in our college PCB Laboratory.

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Volume 4, Issue 4, April 2016

Figure 6: Transmitter section PCB

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Figure 7: Receiver Section PCB

6.CONCLUSIONS
Thus, to collect the greatest amount of energy from the sun, solar panels must be aligned orthogonally to the sun. In
future this type of car has lot of marketing value because it will be used nonrenewable resource and renewable energy.
This type of car does not create any pollution so it is also having a lot of positive point toward nature. Only the
manufacturing cost is high but maintenance cost is almost zero. Hence this car is economic and environmental friendly.
Future work is planned to increase the capability and the efficiency of car by creating a user friendly Graphical User
Interface (GUI).Finally, we are able to design an Eco-friendly, no emission vehicle which is very useful even for
physically challenged and senior citizens.

7.ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We sincerely thank to Smt. Madhurima Santra IN-Charge-DETC, TPI , Mr S.N. Basu Executive Director ,TPI, and the
Staff members of DETC Dept., TPI, family members, friends, one and all who helped us to make this project and paper
successful.

Appendix:
Photos of experimental Car Unit with chair and solar cell

Reference
[1]. Arsie I.,Rizzo G., Sorrentino M.; A Model for the Optimal Design of a Hybrid Solar Vehicle, Review of
Automotive Engineering, Society of Automotive Engineers of Japan (JSAE), 2008, ISSN 1349-4724. 29-3: 439447
[2]. Andrea Vezzini, Hari sharan and Loganathan umanand, (2005) Low-pollution three- wheeler auto rickshaw with
power-assist series hybrid and novel variable DC-link voltage system Journal of Indian institute of science pp.1-14
[3]. Preitl Z., Bauer P., Kulcsar B., Rizzo G., Bokor,J. ,Control Solutions for Hybrid Solar Vehicle Fuel Consumption
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[4]. Srdjan Lukic M., Mulhall P., Choi G., Naviwala M., Nimmagadda S., and Emadi, A. , Usage Pattern Development
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IPASJ International Journal of Electronics & Communication (IIJEC)

A Publisher for Research Motivation........

Volume 4, Issue 4, April 2016

Web Site: http://www.ipasj.org/IIJEC/IIJEC.htm

Email: editoriijec@ipasj.org
ISSN 2321-5984

[9]. Vimal Vas J., Nair V. G., ;Control scheme For Electric Drive Of Solar Powered Vehicles , Indian conference of
INDICON(2008) pp75-80 Annual IEEE
[10]. Wale J. D. and Pollock, Hybrid C. , stepping motors and drives, Power Engineering Journal, vol. 15, pp 5-1220
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AUTHOR
Sibasis Bandyopadhyay received the B. Tech. Degrees in Electronics And communication Engineering
from Techno India, Salt Lake in 2011.He was worked in Cable TV Industry from 2011 and now working
in Technique polytechnic Institute as a lecturer since 2013.

Subha Ram is the final year students of Technique polytechnic Institute in Electronic and Tele
communication. His Interested areas are Communications, Embedded systems and Electronics.

Soumya Dutta is the final year students of Technique polytechnic Institute in Electronic and Tele
communication. His Interested areas are Communications and Electronics.

Arindam Mardanya is the final year students of Technique polytechnic Institute in Electronic and Tele
communication. His Interested areas are Communications and Electronics.

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