Final Design for Automatic Solar Tracker

I have decided on a final design that I will use to rotate a photovoltaic cell to track the sun. I will be using the design shown in Figure 1 below. The photovoltaic cell is placed on the black padding and held on with rubber bands. This wooden design includes a lazy susan that allows the photovoltaic cell to rotate in the phi direction. The base of the wood is marked with increments of five degrees. The vertical piece mounted on the lazy susan allows the photovoltaic cell to rotate in the theta direction.

Figure 1: Solar Tracker Design

 

 

To make this design automatic, I will add a servo motor to the base that will turn the lazy susan. The motor will be controlled by an Arduino that is receiving information from photoresistors which will be placed on the same platform as the photovoltaic cell. Depending on the amount of light that falls on the photoresistors (which will be separated by a wall), the resistance values will change and I will use this concept to write a code that will adjust phi so that both are receiving equal amounts of light. The theta direction will be initially set based on the calculations in the following link but will not change throughout the day. (Note: The Latitude of Loudonville, New York is about 43 degrees North)

http://www.solarpoweristhefuture.com/how-to-figure-correct-angle-for-solar-panels.shtml

 

I have downloaded the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and have loaded simple programs on the Arduino Uno such as Blink or AnalogReadSerial to make sure that things are running smoothly.

 

This coming week, I will began to experiment with writing code that can read in data from a photoresistor and display it on the serial monitor.