I had a small solar tracking kit that was gifted to me last year and I never got around to putting it together so I decided to use this week to finally test it out. The kit included a small solar panel, four photoresistors, two servo motors (two-axis tracking), and a DC-DC boost convertor power supply step up module (stabilizes voltage from the solar panel so the electronics and motors have steady power). Though it may be obvious, what was intriguing to me was the dividers between the four photoresistors that was arranged in a North-West, North-East, South-West, and South-East pattern. The cross divider casts a shadow on the photoresistor when there's misalignment with the light source and when the microcontroller detects that imbalance, it will turn the solar panel directionality until the four voltages are almost equal.
In a previous project of mine in pneumatic actuators, I placed one photoresistor in specified local area which triggered proper inflation, but lacked precision. Learning from this solar tracker exercise, it would have been beneficial to have a small cluster of photoresistors with voltage dividers for more accurate directional control.
Exercise 2: Distance Sensor
For my final project, I wanted to build a soft actuator with air pumps that activate to distance or presence. Gert recommended I use the VL53L1X Time-of-Flight (ToF) distance sensor breakout board by Pololu since it's beginner friendly. In the video demo, the LED on the Arduino Uno board lights up when my object is detected closer to 55cm overhead. More to experiment with this in the next week alongside air pumps for output device.