Solar Panel · Doominic · Isaac · Jc · Trinidad
Demonstrate workflows used in circuit board design and fabrication
Implement and interpret programming protocols
Here you can see our final board where we explain all the process that we made to fabricate and program our Solar Panel.
As we know, we need to capture the sun light. The solar tracker needs 4 light sensors to follow the light, so before to start with programming the stepper motor, we need to capture the light with four light sensors.
Here you can find the instructables that we follow for better comprehention of light sensors
First of all, we start researching how to program motors. As we explain in Week 09, we have two axis to move. One rotational axis and the other one lineal, so we need two stepper motors for moving the solar panel in order to follow the light of the sun. We found that there are several ways to move motors, but in this case we decided to use Arduino to control them with some Pololu drivers. Here you can see a Fritzing diagram that shows how to connect one motor. As you can see is very easy, so we should not have problems programing the two of them.
We started programming the two servo motors with the 4 light sensor. Before beggin with the steppers, we started programming servo motors. We found on Internet how to program with arduino differents projects about solar trackers and we follow one, we analized all the algorithm in order to understand the logic that follows and trigers the movements depending on the sun path.
At the same time, we start studying how the light sensors works. We had some difficulties because they were giving us different ranges of numbers but at the end it was a problem of the connections. We program the 4 of them and then we start experimenting with the container that will be in the solar tracker.
We beging controlling the stepper motors with the CNC Arduino Shield, but we could not control the movement that we wanted; even it did not work it helped us to understand this kind of motor, that is why we decided to use other kind of drivers that allow us to do what we need.
We send data to the motor trough the GRBL library
We use the CNC Arduino Shield with the Pololu drivers. Here we start to reading the data sheet of the Pololu drivers.
Fritzing Circuit Diagram
After some experimentation, this was the result. I did this Fritzing diagram so all the team will be able to understand the functionality of our solar tracker.
Here we start moving only one stepper motor with only one Pololu driver.
Voltage
These two stepper motors need 12V of energy, so we set the volts and turned on everytime we need to make the movement.
Conecctions
Connections are complicated because we combine the two motors, we connect the Pololus with the Arduino and the 12V, besides the connections with the light sensors. It looks like a mess, but it works perfectly.
Rotational Axis
After scanning the ring, my team made a gear that allows to make the movement.
Up and Down Axis
Here you can see how the linear axis is working with the stepper motor.
When we finished to control the stepper motors, we realized that we need to set a limit to the machine with the up and down movement, otherwise we could damage the machine.
Both Systems
Here you can see how it works in the two axis, the linear and the gear one with the information of the light sensors. At the beginning it was too fast, so we changed the code and now works smoothly.
This is our final video; I have to confess that I thought that making a solar tracker would be difficult, but after learning how to code (my aportation in this team was the programming) the steppers with the huge help of the Internet, Fritzing, Arduino, etc. Now I feel everyone can make one very easily. I wonder, why something like this is not so common in the market? Anyway, thanks a lot to the team!
//Arduino
//Fritzing
Fab Academy 2017 | Fab Lab Barcelona | Trinidad A. Gomez Machuca |
IAAC | trinidad.gomez@iaac.net | |