Development of an embedded active dual axis solar tracking and management system

Solar energy is gaining a rapid popularity as an important source of renewable energy. Per se, it is vital for those who aim towards maximizing the total gain of its energy to utilize a method that will insure maximum energy gain by tracking the sun's position during its daily cycle. This research targets the means of collecting the utmost solar energy distributed by the sun by implementing a six sensors dual axis tracking mechanism that will track the sun as it changes its position during its daily cycle. This tracking system is developed based on an open source embedded microcontroller using an open source code that can be easily modified. The tracking system is built on an Atmel ATmega328P microcontroller as the main data collection and decision making unit for the system. This microcontroller is a part of an Arduino Uno developer's board that has a number of General-purpose input/output GPIOs to connect different peripherals to be used in the tracking system and controlled by the microcontroller. These peripherals consist of six light dependent resistors LDR sensors to be used for sensing the sun's position by reading the light intake and sending the readings to the microcontroller to be processed, the LDRs with the most light intensity readings will be the targeted position for the tracking system to move the solar panel towards using two servo motors which will also be connected to the Arduino Uno via the GPIO pins, the two servo motors will have different tasks, one servo motor will be in charge of moving the solar panel vertically and the other servo will move the solar panel horizontally. The performance and characteristics of the six sensors dual axis solar tracker are experimentally analyzed to show the need and advantages of using this method of tracking system. The tests show that the designed embedded solar tracker system is efficiently tracking the sun and collecting much energy as compared to the four sensors tracking system and the static solar panels. In addition the proposed system has advantages over other system represented by real time tracking based on an active sun position computing techniques. The embedded solar tracking system offers cost effective and efficient solar tracking and open source programming which allows for future enhancement and modification.