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 purely in Java. For my reference the Eclipse project is 'SunsMotion' and the package is 'motionPathPrint'.