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HI, I'M UNDER CONSTRUCTION, PLEASE EXCUSE THE ROUGH EXTERIOR—I PROMISE MY CONTENT IS (MOSTLY) GOOD <3

ITP Spring '22 → Energy → Solar Project

For my solar project I wanted to take advantage of the fact that solar is an inherently noisy source of power—how much energy we can harvest depends on the angle that the solar panel is placed, whether there's a shadow cast on any part of it, if a cloud goes over the sun, etc.

My plan is to detect when the solar panel is getting sun by monitoring when the LiPo battery it is plugged into is being charged, and then turning that data into a drawing, first on the computer, and then hopefully with a drawing machine for the final project.

Bill of Materials

Solar monitor: $57.84

Drawing machine: TBD

Some questions I have to figure out:

Solar monitor

Here is the solar half of my project, waiting to be soldered:

Solar panel (left), LiPo charger (top right), and LiPo battery (bottom right).
The Adafruit order arrived super fast! Practically next day :O

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-bq24074-universal-usb-dc-solar-charger-breakout/pinouts

https://github.com/tigoe/LightProjects/blob/main/TelephoneDimmer/RotaryDialDimmer0003/RotaryDialDimmer0003.ino https://github.com/tigoe/timepieces/blob/master/MovingLightClock/MovingLightClock001/MovingLightClock001.ino https://github.com/tigoe/Wifi101_examples/blob/main/ArduinoHttpClient_Examples/HttpClientGetJSON/HttpClientGetJSON.ino

Drawing machine

https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/photography/2020/12/longest-known-exposure-taken-by-makeshift-camera-forgotten-inside-uk-telescope

https://makezine.com/2009/07/30/how-to-build-a-beam-solarroller/

http://solarbotics.net/library/circuits/se_t1_mse.html

https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/GadgetsToGrow/control-servo-power-with-a-transistor-3adce3