DESIGN & FABRICATION OF.A PC-BASED SKY LUMINANCE SCANNER

Abstract

This dissertation "Design & Fabrication of a'PC-based Sky Luminance Scanner', is an inter disciplinary one, involving the Department of Electrical Engineering and Efficiency of Buildings Division of Central Building Research Institute, Roorkee. The system has been installed in the Computer and Microprocessor lab for the purpose of sky luminance distribution measurement. The objective of this work was to develop hardware and user interactive software to control the position of sky scanner accurately at desired points In the sky and electrical analog signal which is coming from transducer converted Into digital signal using 12-bit FADDA card and stored in PC/XT/AT through interfacing circuits. This whole dissertation work is divided into following parts HARDWARE (i) Design and fabrication of a mechanism to generate independent two dimensional motion using two stepper motor in order to accurately position the sky scanner. (ii) Interfacing of two stepper motors to PC by using VPC_IOT timer card. (iii) Interfacing of the transducer to the PC by using 12-bit' FADDA A/D & D/A converter card. SOFTWARE (i) Development of a Menu-driven user-friendly software in order to control the motion of the sky scanner (ii) Development of software for Data Acquisition in order to efficiently handle the data (storing data files in Hard Disk for later use) (iii) Development of a user-friendly integrated environment in order to enable the user to carry out all relevant operations and studies with little effort. (