SAM - Solar Automation Machine.

The lawn crew chewed up my wires, time to re-wire.

8ga wiring everywhere, nice connectors and it's now all loomed. They will have a harder time crewing through that.
The temp sensors were also hot glued to the back of the panels and wired with cat-6. 

And hot glue on glass that gets hot = fail., the temp sensors fell off on the first day back outside.

Worked on a bunch of code last night on the Arduino side and also on the web side.

http://solar.pxn.ca/  is now live with data flowing,  for now it's just sitting in my window taking values, I have not worked on the lux meters yet, so they report 0.
More to come in good time :)

Picked up an Arduino mega and my Adafruit order has arrived.

Had a digispark LCD lying around collecting dust.

I picked up some relays while I wait for the relay board to arrive from DX

Here is a list of parts I ordered from Adafruit.

Went to Princess Auto (Harbour Freight) after work and found a couple small 12V water pumps on sale, $4.99.

Some more tubing, and a few other things that were on sale ;)
The pumps have two ports, I closed one off with some hose crimped at one end.
These pumps are very quiet, move much more water than the used wiper fluid pump, they are  cheaper, and more hackable, say if I wanted to change the motor.

I will now have to work on a reservoir system that can be sunk into the ground, to keep the water chilled. I'll also have to contain the pump to keep the motor from the elements.
A head to spray the panel, and a way to mount that head.
A catch system to recycle the water, probably going to need some filtration here. 
All while still allowing the panel to move in a tracking situation.  Which I still have to build :)


Once I have something I think I'll be able to move onto monitoring the panel's temp and then  give it a bath when it's crossed a threshold.


I also went over to the garbage bins and found a 1m dish and stand, I got the truck and carted it home, to be my new solar panel mount.  I kinda want to try getting C band with it.

Watching Youtube I noticed a few people hosing down their solar panels with water in the hot sun.
I wanted to find out what kind of effect this was having on the efficiency of my panel setup.
This was the start of SAM.

I have a 15w panel I used on my solar truck project and a 60W panel by Aleko from Amazon.
I'd like to build a system to track the sun and monitor the output, as well as automate some outdoor things.

In some further testing I managed to gain about 3W with a 10C drop in temp 50C to 40C
Cooling might be an option during the summer months, the panels easily reach 50C in good summer sun.
I could build a gravity system or a pumped systrem, but with winter around the corner, I should work on other aspects of the larger picture.