Solar Tracker 3

Huh… I am looking for a cave in the Himalayas… Do you know whom to contact if I want a cave for 1 week? Please drop me a line if you do, I really need that. This project is killing me… well not really.

What happened is, I built the panel, but the motor is not able to handle the weight of the panel. We could use bigger motor, but that would mean making use of a motor driver circuit to handle large currents and things like that… It gets bigger and worse. So, we decided to dump the panel for today… ah, I think I forgot, there was an exhibition today. For all the projects. I did not want to participate in the first place cause we have not worked on the project yet. But my friend was excited and he thought the threat to cut 10 marks from the final markings was real, so he paid the money and insisted on us going there.

So, we went there and made a COMPLETE FOOL of ourselves. Where was I… the panel, yeah, so we decided to dump it and went with the circuit. Our circuit consisted of an Analog to Digital converter. We knew that the college has kit for this module, but what we did not know was, the kit only has one input. We wanted 4 inputs. It was too late and we had to discard that circuit also and are still trying on making one ourselves. Maybe it will be over by tomorrow. 2 down, 2 to go.

The other 2 things were a program to get the data and rotate the motor. We did not have the ADC to get the data. We did not have the panel to rotate. I say it again, I have never felt so bad in… last month or so :p It WAS bad. And so I want to take a break… and then come back when my head and mind are all right. There is just too much going on. Some 6-7 assignments, 20 odd programs, 70 odd pages of journal writing…. did I say writing? I mean copying from manual… completely redundant task that should actually be done by a photocopier…. And 50 diagrams with some 20 graphs or something…. I really need a break….

Posts in the series, Solar Tracker :-

  1. Solar Tracker - 1
  2. Solar Tracker - 2
  3. Solar Tracker 3

Submit Article :- BlinkList + Blogmarks + Digg + Del.icio.us + Ekstreme Socializer + Feedmarker + Furl + Google Bookmarks + ma.gnolia + Netvouz + RawSugar + Reddit + Scuttle + Shadows + Simpy + Spurl + Technorati + Unalog + Wink

Posted in: College Life, Design, Electronics, My Life

Tags: , , , , , ,

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 6:42 pm and is filed under College Life, Design, Electronics, My Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Solar Tracker 3”

Ratnadeep October 6th, 2008 at 7:19 pm

Hi,
Solar Tracer, interesting! We also discussed same for the project competition (but just discussed). Are you making any arrengment for moving the panel according the yearly movement of sun. We wanted to do this completely electrical way - as a motor to move solar panel - which moves slightly after each 10 to 15 min break - having some gear arrengment to slow down speed and get appropriate speed - with a manual handle to adjust seasonal sun direction.
For this sem. we also have 8085, so please post details of your project.(One completely technical).
Best Luck.

Aditya October 6th, 2008 at 11:58 pm

Hello there… well it seems (at this point) that we were VERY wrong to go with this project using 8085. Frankly, it sucks.

Well, not totally. People can build it using 8085, but you need a THROUGH knowledge which one cannot have in the same semester as he/she is learning about it.

We do not know about all the functions, the advanced interfacing of 8255 and the ADC. We also have limited knowledge of stepper motor interface.

It looks like we will have to abandon the project. :( Nothing more to say at this point.

Leave a Reply