SunCam V01

Making of the sunCam tripod tracker

The tripod can rotate on the horizontal axis by a full 360 degrees and by 180 degrees (though only 90 is needed) on the vertical axis. The horizontal rotational movement is made by a DC motor controlled with a H-Bridge and the rotation is measured to a high degree of accuracy with a rotational encoder (quadrature encoder). The vertical movement is made by a Servo motor.

The image above shows quite a complicated view of the wiring with the sensors and motors out of view. You can see the H-Bridge which can control the direction of rotation of 2 motors and is simple to program with arduino. I have found the DC motor needs to have its own power supply and that it needs to be on a seperate supply to the rotary encoder because if not the encoder gives some unreliable results. This is what an h-bridge is designed to do so using seperate power supplies is good.

the image above is a screenshot of the interface for the suncam locator server. This runs on a server and can be called remotely from a mobile phone attached to a BT arduino. The server is made in Java and I have used the incredibly accurate equations taken from this excellent site to work out the sun position. For my reference the Eclipse project is 'SunsMotion' and the package is 'motionPathPrint'.

The tripod controller code for the arduino is being tested, there are quite a few anomalies, possible down to hardware issues, I am not sure, but to be precise it is not amazingly accurate at the moment, but it is getting there. To view Tripod Controller code click here