Ancient history - Energo Project

I decided to put together some articles on some jobs I did in the past.
The first one is going back to the 1990 and is a code I developed to manage a solar powered heating on a company called Energo Project (today the company still exists but did change the business and its name is SolarSpot).


The project was to put together a system capable to handle a solar powered heating system based on a new solar panels (at the time) capable to heat up air.

The Energo Project building at the time.

In brief

• Development program in C to control a solar heating plant
• Development data logger embedded in the control program
• Part of design for the hardware interface of the solar heating plant and the computer

In the 1990 I was contacted by the Energo Project to design a control system and data logger for a solar plant.
The hardware was made by Malcotti and I designed and developed the software.
For economic reasons the plant was handled by a PC 8086 Commodore with a 20 Mbyte Hard disk and 512 Kbyte Ram.
After 5 years of running time (24 hours per day, 365 days per year) the original Pc was destroyed and replaced with a PC IBM clone, always with the 8086.
The program was developed entirely using a Borland C compiler.

Some solar panels on the roof

The control room with the PC and the control boards

On the picture above is possible to see in the monitor the main mask of the program.
On the rear, right side it is possible to see the multiplexer group to collect the temperatures and in the center the load management.

There were 16 temperature channels read by the software one by one, using this hardware as switch.

The load management, in other words the relay that did allow the computer to control the plant.

Each roof section was designed to absorb the solar radiation and heat the air inside the roof.
With some valves and fan the hot air was withdrawn and moved to a "condenser" and switch to be sent in all the rooms.
Valves and fan were activated by the program that did analyze many parameters (temperatures, flows, solar radiation, etc.) to decide which valve or fan needed to be activated.
It is possible to see on the roof some solar sensors to measure the solar power.

Not only the roof was a heat collector, also the external walls (shown in the first picture).

I'm quite sure many young people will be surprised to learn that already in the ancient history people was developing systems that today are defined "IoT" :) using old PCs and relays :)