An Efficient Solar Powered-Microcontroller Based Digital Led Display System

Abstract

This paper presents a design of solar powered microcontroller based digital LED display board. The solarpowered microcontroller based solution presented in this work utilizes a non-conventional display technology format HUB 12 driven from a PIC 18F4620 microcontroller through a serial peripheral interface (SPI) communication protocol. Text to be displayed are written or received in their ASCII format and mapped into the display area from the SPI via shift registers. It also integrates the transmission and reception of information through a computer unit with the aid of a radio frequency transceiver module (KYL-500S) to ensure information flexibility. The system is powered by a renewable energy source using 12V/200W solar panel, two 12V/7Ah batteries and a charge controller. The results obtained showed that the system can display any form of text message information provided characters are mapped unto the display area using hexadecimal code from the standard ASCII character.