Senior Project - Cyrano

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Advanced Vehicle Systems Branch is responsible for collecting data from the Hybrid Electric Vehicle Challenge, a student engineering competition which will involve 42 vehicles from the United States and Canada in June 1994. The purpose of this project was to design, program, test, and document a Windows-based program to display, store, and analyze the data taken during the competition. The data acquisition hardware was a Kilowatt-Hour+ meter from Cruising Equipment in Seattle, which measures voltage, current, time, and calculated kilowatt-hours used. The meter sends these four pieces of information every second to a standard RS-232 port, which may be plugged into a laptop, where it may be displayed using various visual representations of the data, e.g. as a digital display, as a bar graph, or as a gauge. Various display configurations can be designed, stored, and reused. In addition to the capability to display the incoming data second by second in real time, the program also provides a means to calculate and display instantaneous power output from the measured current and voltage, computation to check the equipment's kilowatt-hour calculation, and a battery energy remaining calculation and gage display. The software was developed using Visual C++ in a PC Windows environment.