Hello everyone,

The Solar Tracking team has been able to fix the gear system for the azimuth rotation. With that being fixed, we were able to do tests to measure the power consumption of the motor with the solar panel attached. We did additional experiments with the actual solar sensors attached to simulate the actual scanning movement of the panel. From this, we gathered data on how much power is consumed during the set-up phase. We did see some problems of the motor producing enough power during the first scan, but this is probably due to the lazy susan bearings not being perfectly aligned. But, we saw that the sensor was still able to make the panel orient in the correct direction, so corrections may be made in the future.

Also, after examining the power gain data from last week, we decided give the errors in our sensors, it will not make much sense to include the elevation motor and gear assembly component in our final prototype. Instead, we will allow the user to make elevation angle changes depending on the season. This simplifies our design and also lowers the cost to manufacture.

The only other major hardware component left to complete this coming week 8 is the base of our mount that holds the motor and gear systems. We plan to have this complete by the end of week 8 so that we can have our final prototype assembled by week 9.

– Solar Tracking 2017-2018