The Ultimate Solar Tracker

[@evanbarnes9984]

Back in the early 2000s I was really into BEAM robotics, and there were a lot of designs for this type of thing in that area. They were also energy harvesting and built from discrete electronics. There was always something really elegant about those designs that MCU driven designs have never quite captured for me. Excellent work!

[@leosbagoftricks3732]

I know of Beam, and I would be lying if I said it wasn't an influence!

[@Brians-Easy-Low-Tech-Solutions]

I have a tracking solar cooker (fairly big heavy thing) that uses an airlift pump and a mini waterwheel and "winch" to move the reflector around. (I kid you not and it works well) Instead of running a motor, could your solar tracker open and close an air valve? I only need one because I manually move it back to dawn position in the evening. (Its low pressure stuff and I currently use something to pinch a rubber tube to control the speed of movement to the 15 degrees per hour.) The air valve would be off and the solar tracker just needs to turn it on until the waterwheel moves it enough to point at the sun, then it shuts off again. Its in my videos. I currently use gradually rising air pressure to rise a float to turn it on, It works but it is too bulky. Thanks Brian

[@thecasualengineer99]

there are a small number of high quality electronics people. Leo is one of the most significant electorinc educators on YT. Great work Leo :)

[@kmnl926]

Love it. Now we need a full-size tracker for 2 large panels and compare output with 2 stationary panels of same make.

[@levyrogers6979]

This great my friend. Well done. We need more people like you.

[@dr_fish]

Excellent! For a larger version, I'd love to see a hybrid of your design and NightHawkInLight's.

[@romancharak3675]

Your circuit explanation is GOLD ! Thank you.

[@DadofScience]

Great stuff, Leo. I love a discrete through hole design and the little common mode choke is very clever.

[@gargoreg]

So interesting to how an electronics Engineer approaches a quite simple problem, resulting with a very clean design. 👏 Contrast with the youtube film makers reaching for a MCU complete with bells and whistles. The use of an MCU is actually quite a complex solution requiring relative expensive components, 'a hammer to crack a nut'.

[@accountant1653]

Genius lies in simplicity. Congratulations on the great outcome of this project Thank you for the video, I watched it with great interest!

[@jstro-hobbytech]

Thats awesome. We're alot alike. I meet random people and cater learning kits to their goals. I send free kits to anyone in the us or Canada and the local makerspace. I use half my disposable income. Your stuff is on another level. I hope you make a fortune. Ill buy a kit from you and you can give it away if you like. I have all the parts and gear to copy your's but id never do that haha. Id send you a bunch of motors and such if you weren't in thailand.

[@Dukey8668]

Very neat design, as always. Not that relevant here given the design requirements, but in future proects you might consider a resonant-royer (baxandall) converter in place of a joule thief. They need a more complicated transformer (3 primary windings) and two transistors. You can use a ~$5 CCFL backlight transformer for this (the most common use for resonant royer converters) or wind your own. The circuit's main advantage is that its transformer current is highly sinusoidal, which should improve efficiency over a standard joule thief. With a CCFL transformer I had a ~0.7v input converted to ~500v output, though I didn't measure efficiency. There is an excellent app note by the late Jim Williams on this topology.

[@azurehydra]

So cool! Very creative design. Top notch. 👌

[@GoatZilla]

this is a really advanced design for an educational product. one improvement might be some limit switches to prevent overtravel in the wrong direction as you sort of discovered.

[@leosbagoftricks3732]

No harm done, it happily spins 360 with no ill effects.

[@OmarMekkawy]

And finally we have our entertainment for today 😂

[@uquarosh]

Great project. But I miss a part six.😢

[@ianactually]

Good stuff and best of luck with Playative - would have loved such kits as a youngster! BTW your box of existential crises seems to be overheating 🙂

[@aussielass5621]

I came here looking for a sun tracker motor for solar cooker. This video is easy to understand & very good. But not sure if it would handle weight of solar cooker, which vary in weight.

[@leofernekes343]

You could totally scale this up with larger solar panels, capacitors and a gearmotor

[@Protoex]

I like your technique of analog circuit trickery to make things work with small part count. I would love to understand your design process. But I don't quite understand why you need the scr. I would expect some latch action for the output, but the capacitor on the mosfet gate should keep the output running until the storage is fully depleted. So it seems to me that this scr is actually behaving as an analog comparator, generating a "digital" output.

[@leosbagoftricks3732]

Yes, if the transition between not conducting to conducting was 'soft' - a really weak charging current would just leak off and it would never trigger

[@WhatDadIsUpTo]

Wow! Uber-complicated. Mine uses two narrow pipes, each set above a solar cell that act as on/off switches driving a tiny 1.5volt motor with a worm gear driving a helically-cut down gear. My collector array is set to swivle about a fixed axis - set @ my mean lattitude. In early morning, it tracks East (using a 1.5volt battery triggered by a relay and a fixed contact) until the first tube finds light, stopping the travel. "East" is @ the sun's 10:00 o'clock position. That's it . . . Nothing fancy.

[@ZomB1986]

Yet another competitor to Mark Rober's Crunch Labs Build Box, Steve Mould's KiwiCo, and Vsauce's Curiosity Box? Let's Goooooooooooooo

[@thygate]

How about dumping the caps into a dummy load resistor when the voltage difference between the caps is smaller than some tunable value, to get rid of the hunting ?

[@leosbagoftricks3732]

I have considered this, it's very tricky to implement in a discrete design. It would be fun to do a version based on a micro that has this feature, the challenge here is keeping the parasitic losses low enough, it would be a master class in low-power design!

[@robstorms]

thanks !!

[@eemonster]

i think u should explain y u started with a full h bridge but the final circuit only needed 2 high side transistors which i think would extend to y u choose between bjt's and fets and n channel/npn and p channel/pnp cause its a clever and unusual hybrid h bridge

[@leosbagoftricks3732]

I start- and end with an H bridge. The low side is an FET so it can be voltage driven, and therefore can be held ON by a simple gate capacitor to extend the output pulse. If I made the whole bridge from BJT's, It would require current to keep it in conduction and it would drop out before the caps went to 0 volts.

[@robstorms]

wonder if no dead band will wear out the motor fast

[@leosbagoftricks3732]

Yes- this is a good point. An improvement would be to add a dead-band to prevent this mechanical wear- but it's really tricky to do with a discrete design. A microcontroller would make this possible, but it would be hard to keep the parasitic drain of the micro down low enough that it would not dominate at low light levels - a real design challenge!

[@GoatZilla]

@@leosbagoftricks3732 Wouldn't this just be some sort of hysteresis producing circuit/ic sitting right at the controls of the h-bridge?

[@leosbagoftricks3732]

@@GoatZilla Difficult to employ- begs for a totally different architecture

[@DeeP_BosE]

y not use photo resistors/ photo transistor

[@vidrepo3017]

I think my grandma was put on playative care after she had a stroke