Terminal for park and charge using microcontroller

Abstract

Literature shows that almost 60 million cars were produced worldwide is 2011 and the trend shows that these numbers are always growing. One can immediately start estimating the impact such huge numbers of cars have on our environment. Now, more than ever, the need of safeguarding our environment is being given more importance to avoid causing more irreparable problems to our planet. The future of cars seems to be moving towards electricity powered motors. Companies like Mitsubishi, Nissan and Tesla already have their own electric vehicles. In order to motivate more people to switch to electric cars, governments worldwide have to invest in the infrastructure so as to make electric vehicles viable. The rising interest in electric cars has led to the need of studying the back-end infrastructure in order to be able to support these cars. In the future, the number of petrol stations may go down, and they may be replaced by park and charge facilities to cater for the demand created by electric cars. This project models and simulates a park and charge facility so that prospective park and charge owners can know what to expect from their business. One of the interesting results obtained from this model is that there is no need to have all cars in the car park charging simultaneously. In fact, for a park and charge facility with ten spaces in a busy area, six or seven charges at a time is enough. The project is divided in three parts: The first part is a computer program that generates all the probabilities and works out all the required computations to allocate charge efficiently. The second part is a computer program working in conjunction with a microcontroller on which computations required for the efficient allocation of charge are performed. The third part is a microcontroller working by itself with the help of input from the users.