期刊名称：Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology
印刷版ISSN：1992-8645
电子版ISSN：1817-3195
出版年度：2016
卷号：94
期号：1
出版社：Journal of Theoretical and Applied
摘要：Solar energy is gaining a rapid notoriety 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 an embedded tracking mechanism that will track the sun as it changes its position during its daily cycle. This embedded tracking system is developed based on an open source embedded single board computer (SBC) using an open source code that can be easily modified. The embedded tracking system is built on SBC type RaspberryPi as the main data collection and decision making unit for the system. This microcontroller is a part of an SBC developer's board that has a number of GPIOs to connect different peripherals to be used in the tracking system and controlled by the microcontroller. These peripherals consist of four 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 LDR with the most light intensity readings will be the targeted position for the embedded tracking system to move the solar panel towards using two servo motors which will also be connected to the SBC 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 solar tracker are experimentally analyzed to show the need and advantages of using this method of embedded tracking system. The results show that the designed embedded solar tracking system is efficiently tracking the sun and collecting more energy as compared to the static solar panels. In addition to the proposed embedded system has advantages over other system represented by real time tracking based on an active sun potion computing technique. The embedded solar tracking system offers cost effective and efficient solar tracking besides open source programming which allows for future enhancement and modification.
关键词：Embedded Systems; Open Source Technology; Solar Tracker; Sensing; Solar Panels; Renewable Energy
