Solar Heater Demonstration
Circuitry
Arduino
CEP
Each year, seniors at my high school complete a Civic Engagement Project (CEP), a year-long project that aims to get students more involved with their community through service, civic participation, and other means. Part of the project also focuses on making contributions to one of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
For my CEP project, I decided to focus on UN Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy.
The Presentation
As part of the project, I collaborated with Spring Valley Nature Center, a local nature preserve, to make an educational presentation on some of the benefits, implementations, and applications of solar power in commercial/residential areas.
I would then be able to show my presentation at a booth at Spring Valley's Earth Day Party in April, where people in attendance would be able to learn about different methods of conservation and sustainability.
The Demonstration
Part of this presentation included a set of demonstrations on different applications of solar energy, one of which was a solar oven (similar to the DIY science fair ovens used to cook pizza outside).
Since the event was largely catered to young children and their parents, the information about the solar oven had to be presented in a fun and safe way. Since cooking food was off the table (too much of a health risk), I decided to display the temperature inside the oven with infographics instead.
To achieve this, I first setup a Django web app that handled my frontend, backend (including model structure), and communication between the services.
From there, I connected a DS18B20 thermometer to an Arduino and, via the OneWire protocol, read and displayed the internal temperature data on the serial monitor for my port. I could read the monitor with a separate python script, and copy the data into an SQLite running in my app via Django.
On my frontend, I had a script that requested the most recent value in the database every second and used it to alter the state of a clipart mercury thermometer, allowing the temperature data to be displayed in a fun and interesting way on my laptop screen.
Overall, the project was a success and it proved to be very fun and engaging for the event attendees. However, I also learned that the kids enjoyed playing with the solar-powered T-Rex toy I bought at Walmart way more. Fortunately, it was still a great learning experience that taught me a lot about how circuits and electronics relate in the realm of computing and computer engineering.