A hardware model of a solar tracker has been developed to explore different technical and environmental aspects to generate maximum power. The proposed model consists of a dual-axis structure, whose operation is based on maximum solar irradiance for a specific location. Three modes of operation differing in the degree of freedom of axes movement were tested using two distinct control strategies. Further, different tilt angles were considered for this study. The software platform used to operate the hardware model is Arduino Pro Mini. To analyse the effect of the above approaches on the output voltage and to further assess the implications on the all-day efficiency and cost, an in-house computer code written in the C programming language is used as the basic controller. The code interfaced with Arduino UNO.

Keywords : Solar tracker; Fabrication; Optimization, Precise Position Algorithm.