Doomsday preppers, hoarders, take note…
Electrical power can go down at any time due to natural disasters, overwhelmed power stations and, of course, various apocalypses. Still, in those times, some of the more thrifty individuals turn to gas powered generators to keep their frozen burritos cool and their favorite shows playing on TV. However, those generators pretty heavy, notoriously loud (tipping off zombies to your location) and generate plenty of exhaust, probably adding to that global warming issue – making your bunker stuffy.
To get around those issues, Arduino fan Kurt (from Kurt’s Arduino Projects), designed his ‘Mobile Sun Tracking Solar Power Plant to keep civilization running smooth. To get the solar panel to track the sun, Kurt used a cheap (little more than $1) LED flashlight and replaced the LEDs with three LDR photo sensors (each with their own shade). The sensors then send information to an Arduino Uno, which processes the info and instructs an Adafruit Shield to drive both a servo and linear actuator for optimum panel placement. The energy is stored in two 12V Gel deep-cycle batteries that are wired in parallel for a total of 85Ah.
While not as heavy as gasoline-powered generator, it still weighs in at 58lbs, which doesn’t actually scream ‘mobile’ but you could probably rig wheels to it and drag it behind you while on the go. Head over to the blog for the complete project breakdown and download!
But Doomsday fanatics realize this… all the food you store, supplies you keep, and electricity you generate… you are just doing it all for me, when I come over and take it. See you within minutes of Zero-Hour. Thanks!
7 thoughts on “Mobile Solar Power Plant”
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Wouldn’t it be much simpler to use a polar mount (rotational axis of mount parallel with earth’s axis, and a single motor? The motor could be a small synchronous motor run from a simple timing circuit, like a clock motor. No need for complex and power hungry circuits when you know the track of the sun. Also, why a 30A charger when the panel you are using probably puts out 1.5A maximum?
I think it’s a good idea to use the beefier charge controller. Gives you additional scalability to add more panels and batteries in the future. Solar panels have really dropped in price to around $1/watt. So I can see adding 200W of additional panels to this setup. Anyway, with a 50w panel you would be pushing a maximum of about 3.5A at 14VDC into the batteries, not 1.5A.
Personally I use the “armstrong” method of repositioning my panels. KISS.
How much should be the min temeprature to get 80% charged?
regards,
Abdul
Looking over the source code, there’s an amazing number of similarities with the code shared on this project: http://www.polyideas.com/blog/2014/3/27/building-a-2-axis-solar-tracking-robot-aka-solarbot.
Really thank ful of you to provide me this kind of information. Read USTA shop (United States Tennis Association)
It’s always great to see more companies go solar for powering their businesses.
Nice chunk of information. Will love to read it more and more time.
struts netbeans