Solar Tracker, self powered and auto aligning

Whilst addressing the problem of the azimuth attachment bolt coming loose, I've also decided that I need some form of damping in higher winds.

Fortunately, I've got a range of the hydraulic lift arms which I bought in the earlier experiments. Once the weather improves, I'm going to attach a couple of 10KG force lift arms to both axes of the solar array and see if that helps reduc rattling in high winds. I think that it was the rattling that managed to loosen the attachment bolt, so some damping should help.

I'll update once I've tried it ouit

We've had some very high winds here in Northumberland due to the thunder storms that have been hitting us. So, the azimuth linear actuator attachment that swings the array horizontally has managed to work it's way loose and the array is swinging around rather alarmingly.

I've come up with a solution which is to replace the attachment bolt fixing which was just a nut and a locking washer with a nylon captcher nut and it seems to be a lot firmer. I think that the attachment brackets that come with the linear actuators probably need changing as well as they don't have a ball bearing attachement, just a simple pin and hole arrangement.

Today, I managed to get time to to an introduction video for the solar power harvesting project.

you can see it on youtube here... Intro Video

After a very busy few weeks, I successfully got 3 solar panels mounted onto the tracking platform...more's the point, the whole rig survived some pretty strong gales