This is the second update video for the project we are doing for the 2012 Phoenix Contact Xplore competition.
Project Summary: For our senior project in Engineering at Elizabethtown College, we are creating a hybrid solar tracking system by using Phoenix Contact’s Nanoline Solar Calculator to track the sun’s seasonal movement and by using a small solar panel as a sensor to track the sun’s daily movement. We are using Phoenix Contact equipment to do all of the sensor measurements and to control the movement of the solar panels.
Project Update #1: Lutron Electronics donated motors for us to use to move our solar panels. A problem we encountered was figuring out how to control the Lutron motors using a Phoenix Contact nanoLC. We came up with a way to control the motors by exploiting the manual push-button control feature that they have. We also implemented a system that allowed us to test our method of closed-loop motor control using a nanoLC along with motors and analog-output accelerometers.
Project Update #2 (this video): We have built the frames that will be used to hold the small solar panels for the demo of our tracking system. Since we are using 2 nanoLC’s that need to communicate from separate locations, we needed a way to overcome the limitations of the nanoLC ethernet modules. We did this by creating a Java application to serve as the Modbus Master for the nanoLC Modbus slaves, which enabled us to transfer values between the 2 nanoLC’s. In addition to this, we also have our control system software outlined, so it can now be programmed into our main control nanoLC.
Post time: Jan-18-2017