This is a powerful board for solar tracking and any kind of robotics where you need a 3 phase motor driver (can also run 2 DC motors at a time), a magnetic compass, a 3 axis accelerometer and a real time clock. In particular it can be a slave which is connected to e.g. a raspberry pi via RS232, RS485 or I2C. In the front picture it says "hack it" but I am actually offering to hack it for you and give you a fully assembled and programmed board for $40 + shipping. I want to add the robotics slave feature anyway and I would profit much from your requests and insights. Please contact me at rudiggi@gmx.net and give your email the subject "Tracker" such that it will be whitelisted.

The primary use of this board is the control of single or dual axis solar trackers. In particular, we developed this board to track concentrator photovoltaic “CPV” modules that require a dual axis tracking accuracy of 0.1°. The cost of CPV trackers has been driven up by the use of encoders and end switches which also caused failures as the cables degraded in the sunlight and the housings of the external sensors filled up with rainwater. So here is a single board that does it all without external sensors - except for a wind sensor and even that may eventually be replaced by shake detection. The astronomical tracking is done with a magnetic compass, an accelerometer, a real time clock and an astronomical algorithm. Whenever there is sun, a shading beam sun sensor with 4 LEDs as photodiodes takes over to achieve a precision much better than 0.1°. A great advantage of this board is its ability to work with any solar tracker that uses DC motors. The adaptation to a specific hardware is done by entering EEPROM resident parameters through the Arduino serial monitor.

I have developed the code on an assembly of breakout boards and tested it on various trackers. A bit more than a year ago, Ermanno Antonelli joined me, a real electronics native who already took household machinery apart when he was a small kid. We have received and tested the first 25 prototypes of the latest version of the board. Our goal is to build a community around it and make it widely available through many online shops. Solar tracking alone will probably be not enough to do this trick. So, we also promote the board as a general robotics board for any project that can make use of

• A 6 -axis compass (magnetic MXC4005XC and acceleration MMC5603)
• RS485 long distance communication
• Real time clock
• Powerful 12-36V, 8A 3-phase motor controller  (up to 50V with an input filtering capacitor replacing the TVS diode, up to 100V with different FETs. Run 2 DC motors at the same time or 3 DC motors, one at a time.)
• ATMEGA328pb with all unused pins available as pins on the board
• Snippets of the open CPV tracker controller code.

Please have a look here for a detailed description of the board and its possible applications for solar tracking and robotics:

https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/1851307920601920/v2_0f_board_for_solar_tracking_and_robotics.pdf

Thanks to a sponsoring from PCBWay we can offer the first 25 pcs at a price of $40 which will only be reached again in mass production. Apply for one of these boards by describing your idea in the forum.

This is still all about saving the world. But there is no reason why we shouldn’t have fun in doing so.

We have published the complete project as open source under MIT license. This includes:

• CAD-CAM files for the controller board.
• CAD-CAM files for "pogo board", an Arduino UNO shield that contacts the tracker controller board for ICSP programming and testing.
• The latest Arduino code
• A detailled documentation and manual https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/1851307920601920/2022_12_29_Full_description.pdf

An alternate project page is hosted at hackaday.io

https://hackaday.io/project/185130-open-concentrating-pv-solar-tracker-controller/

More information concerning an earelier stage of the project can be found here:

https://github.com/SolHunter/Open_CPV_Solar_Tracker_Control

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/5.0101466