International Journal of Science, Engineering and TechnologyAuthors: Anshuman Singh, Shubham Manish Chhaparia, Anurag, Saravanakumar R
Abstract: Low-cost photovoltaic (PV) tracking prototypes are frequently reported as hardware demonstrations, with little attention to how their internal signals can be observed, compared, and reproduced. This paper presents the design and implementation of an Arduino Uno-based dual-axis solar tracking prototype that senses the direction of stronger illumination with four light-dependent resistors (LDRs) behind a cross-shaped divider, positions the panel with two hobby servos on a 3D-printed pan–tilt frame, and additionally monitors panel voltage and soil moisture, with a relay-switched pump load for threshold-based irrigation. The controller streams one nine-field comma-separated frame per cycle over USB serial. Two monitoring clients are described. A MATLAB dashboard reads the serial stream directly and plots the four LDR channels, panel voltage, soil moisture against dry and wet thresholds, and pump state in real time. An NI LabVIEW virtual instrument implements a virtual-sun model of the quadrant error calculation, deadband stepping, and a simulated solar-power estimate, and polls a local Flask HTTP endpoint through its HTTP client functions. We derive the quadrant error model, show that the LabVIEW model’s errors reduce to −12 and +12 times the angular offsets, and report an eight-point, 140 s observation window of the live dashboard in which the top-right LDR operated close to ADC saturation. No tracking gain, energy yield, or communication latency is claimed. Closed-loop convergence, fixed-versus-tracking comparison, and endpoint latency are instead specified as a reproducible test protocol and identified as future work. The paper therefore documents what was built, what was measured, and what remains to be validated, so that the prototype can be reproduced and extended.
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