Shield to build a robotic lawn mower, powered with solar energy and able to operate just with the clean energy from the sun; this one is a great difference from the commercial projects having a robot in need of a charging station connected to the electrical grid.

The shield has been designed using recent components with specific functions, thus the need to use high-integration SMD components, that allowed to fit everything into a shield that is compatible with Arduino. Even in this project we calculated the possibility to activate or deactivate the solar panel; for this purpose we relied on the integrated circuit ASSR 1611, a solid state switch that is controlled by an opto-isolator. 

Two integrated circuits ACS712 allow the measuring of the current supplied by the solar panel and of the current absorbed by the cutting engine: the version with a range of 5 A seemed more than enough for us.

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