Thershen Govender, a student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, earned himself a cheque for $500 after winning second place in an international electronics design competition run by UK-based Labcenter Electronics.
Left to right: Thershen Govender’s lecturer, Dr. Chitra Venugopal; Thershen Govender; Dane du Plooy, owner of Dizzy Enterprises which represents Labcenter Electronics in South Africa.
The competition challenged students to come up with any innovative design using Labcenter’s new Proteus Visual Designer software, which uses a flowchart-based programming scheme for designing microcontroller firmware. Govender’s detailed design, titled ‘T Load Analyzer’, focused on the importance in South Africa (and indeed the world) of saving energy.
Presenting information to the user on a 2,8” TFT display, the design measures various AC and DC electrical loads and calculates instantaneous energy usage in Watts as well as total energy used in kWh. The entire project is accomplished within four flowchart sheets as well as a schematic sheet, and using Proteus’ powerful simulation capabilities the entire design is testable and debuggable on a computer.
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