Smart Solar Lighting: FPGA-Driven Control for Sustainable and Adaptive Illumination

Nowadays, electricity has become an essential need to carry out people’s daily routines. One of the applications of electricity is to provide electrical power to our home lighting system at night. However, most of the electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels. Fossil fuel is a non-renewable and finite resource, which causes pollution to the environment. Instead of burning fossil fuels, the renewable resource solar energy could be a great solution. The solar panel generates electrical power from solar energy stored in the lead-acid battery through the charging and discharging process. The solar-powered lighting system is controlled by the Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA Development board. Field Programmable Gate Array is an integrated circuit containing programmable logic blocks and interconnection circuits. It is used as a system controller that is programmed by uses Verilog HDL according to different requirements. The output of this project is the lead-acid battery provides power to light on the LED when the Light Dependent Resistor detects darkness and the lead-acid battery in a fully-charged situation. Also, the lead-acid battery will change the state from discharging to the charging stage when low voltage is detected. This project involves developing a solar-powered lighting system via Field Programmable Gate Array and the analysis of the number of battery cycle life based on the different Depth of Discharge (DOD).