Solar Charging Station Engineering Project

Working in collaboration with the Laney Coding Club (LCC) , our current engineering project for this semester is to design and produce a beta prototype of a solar charging station. The idea behind this project is to help make it easier for students to charge their small electronic devices when they are spending their time outdoors on campus where a power outlet may not be immediately available to them. The charging station will implement a USB port(s) to help delivery power to your small electronic devices such as cell phones, iPods, music players, etc. The final design of the charging station will have the ability to, under its own power, adjust the pitch of the solar panel by +/- 10 degrees to take advantage of the suns rays during peak hours. 



Currently we are on the feasibility and conceptualization design phase. Our meeting today (02/27/13) was incredibly helpful for us to convey the concept behind the project and to help familiarize our members with tasks that they will be required to do as the project progresses. Today, members learned how to correctly solder together multiple solar cells together in series in preparation for the real thing. We will be assembling our actual panel in the coming weeks. 



Please take a look at the pictures from today! More information will be released as the project moves from the different design phases.



*The video below shows the operation of the tracking system that we will be using for our project. There are three light sensing resistors (LSRs) that enables the arduino board to compute and adjust the servo position so that the center sensor is pointed at the brightest source of light. You can see the servo responding to the change in intensity of the light at the different sensors.*