Comments on: Will Robot Trackers Reduce the Costs of Solar?

By: dynamoe.joe

dynamoe.joe — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 19:23:00 +0000

Ummm, its not floating, its riding on that horizontal rail you see in the picture there.

By: Growl

Growl — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 15:54:00 +0000

Why bother with a sun sensor? A micro controller could compute the position more accurately than any sensor. A chain or belt drive could adjust multiple panels of an array.

The robot is totally useless for rooftop home or office systems. Home and office systems will probably exceed the much larger ground based systems.

By: Bob_Wallace

Bob_Wallace — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 04:56:00 +0000

There’s no need for controllers and rotators on every single panel. That makes no sense.

You gang a lot of panels together in a single frame and move a boat load of panels at once. All it takes is a single sensor mounted to the rack to determine Sun position and a single CPU can control an entire farm.

Of course panels are getting so cheap that it likely doesn’t pay to track. Perhaps if you’re installing close to the equator it might.

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BTW, I don’t believe that Wiki claim that 85% of all large installations use trackers. Doesn’t ring true at all.

By: Ronald Brak

Ronald Brak — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 04:25:00 +0000

This story would be more convincing if the picture didn’t consist of a limbless robot hovering in the air emitting a Doctor Who special effect.

By: anderlan

anderlan — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 16:24:00 +0000

I’ve thought about connecting multiple arrays with a belt so one motor and controller would work them all, but that would be limited to one axis. This looks like it might truly cut costs! The interface is simply mechanical, so small sites (like a home) could use the same frames with third party (or homespun) motors and controllers connected to each.