Design and Analysis of a Low Cost VI Analyzer using Arduino UNO and matlab

interface for a buck converter

ABSTRACT

The need to plot (and filter) digital data from a sensor or front end circuit is
ubiquitous in embedded systems. In this paper a new, low cost and efficient VI analyzer has
been designed using the Arduino open source electronic platform for monitoring the the VI
characteristics of a DC to DC converters. The designed analyzer is observed to have
satisfactory accuracy and provides deep insight even in case of PV converters. The analyzer
comprises of Arduino UNO, voltage sensor and current sensor.

To get solid data for for analysing, monitoring it is required to build a simple
monitoring network for the present project. The system should be cheap, easily extensible
and preferably without any hard or time consuming coding. Sensors employed should be
digital ones with single-wire serial protocol—the connection between a main unit and the
sensor would require only three wires and would be less affected by a noise.

It’s always good to plot/filter/process the data in the same environment, and plot data
in Matlab . This projects will talk about how to write a simple .m file to read data from the
serial port of a PC and plot it onto a figure in “real-time”, instead of oscilloscope does.

The following materials are required to imeplement this hardware:

1. A device that is continuously writing to the USB port, this can be a microcontroller
or a USB based sensor

2. MATLAB programming knowledge

Keywords-Arduino UNO; VI Analyzer; Data Acquisition Sensor