Implementation of a Solar Tracking System with GPS Module Integration

Electrical Engineering

The sun illuminates the whole earth by rising from east and setting in the west. The sun rays irradiating directly on a panel gives the best output and hence the panel must directly face the sun throughout the day for maximum efficiency and output. Hence, a solar tracking system was designed to focus a solar panel directly towards the sun as it moves through the sky every day. It was designed using a single axis tracking controller system, which tracks the sun based on astronomical equations which uses time, date and location to locate the sun’s position. The proposed system employs the use of an Arduino Atmega 328P as its major component, saddled with the task of finding the instant sun’s position based on a Solar Position Algorithm (SPA) and with the aid of a real-time clock (RTC) and the global positioning system (GPS) module. The system also periodically measures the panel’s location using an accelerometer to adjust any error between the measured and the calculated angles. After construction, the system was tested by running it for 10 hours from which favorable results were achieved.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.