As we know, sun is a one of the most important component in this world. Without sun, it is impossible for a human or living creature to live in this world. Humans nowadays feel uncomforted about the global warming situation. Even this kind of situation bring a lot of negative perception, they should have to think it through the positive way. One of the way to reduce the global warming is to reduce the utilizing of electrical voltage and change to a natural voltage source like wind, rain, tides, sunlight and geothermal heats. So, the engineers try to create a new device that can convert the natural energy to an electrical energy like solar panel for sunlight energy, wind turbines for wind energy, water turbines. The problem that still exists now is the device that invests by an engineer. For example, the solar panel that many of the users use is only in a one way direction. If the sun located at the direction that isnt not perpendicular to the solar panel, the power that can be generate is low compare to the when the sun located exactly perpendicular to the solar panel. The sun is rotate from east to west but the highest power that can be generate by the solar panel is when location of sun is perpendicular to the solar panel. So the power that can be use in the night day is quite short. So, the project that I will do is called ‘Solar Tracker for Monitoring System’. This is because the sunlight can generate a clean and free power. This project helps for power generation by setting the equipment to get maximum sunlight automatically.
In order to produce maximum power output, solar tracker is design with motor so that the photovoltaic panel will move toward the position of sun. To control the solar panel so that it will always face the sun, the circuit has LDR sensor that encoder with PIC programming that consistent to the sun movement. The PIC programming indicates the time to move every 20 seconds. It gives signal to the motor to move the photovoltaic panel. When the photovoltaic panel face directly to the sun and has maximum concentrated sunlight to the photovoltaic panel, the maximum power output will produce. The solar tracker is design as active tracker. It moves according to the sun movement and controlled by microcontroller. The solar tracker is design as low cost and easily to use. The solar tracker is design low cost due to the expensive of solar panel. To decrease the cost, we use solar tracker. Besides that, this solar tracker use to save electricity in producing maximum power from solar panel because solar power is renewable energy.
