A CAD rendering of our design for this solar tracking panel

This project was done as a part of a lab expirement in our Mechanical Engineering Lab (MECE E3028) with Professor Qiao Lin in Spring 2020. This was actually the last project we were able to work on in person before Columbia University shut down in response to the Covid-19 Crisis in March 2020.

The project’s objective was to design, machining, wire, and coding a soolar panel to track a light source and follow it in order to efficiently collect light. We worked on this as a team which included me, Jonah Schaechter , Christian Chong, Aryeh Walter, and Annika Thomas.

The components of the project were designed on Solidworks. The base plate and photorecepter holder were 3D printed for an accurate fit on their respective devices. All the other componenrs were laser cut in the makerspace.

Here we see the final machined and wired apparatus
This a gif from a recording of our final testing the day before campus was closed.

A special thanks to Andrey Shilo for helping us avoid a fire when we shorted our motorshield, Amanda Lombardo for letting us use her super fast and beautiful 3D printer and everyone at the makerspace. Finally, Benedict for assisting us in the debugging process.