Implementation of solar time based sun tracking systems for mobile platforms and smart cities

Solar energy is slated to drive a sustainable future of clean and renewable energy sources. Efficient solar tracking is necessary to achieve acceptable power output per unit incident solar radiation from photovoltaic cells. This paper proposes a GPS based solar tracking system, which has been prototyped on the FRDM-KL25Z (based on the ARM Cortex M0+ MCU) platform by NXP. A significant part of the prototyping effort has been dedicated towards reducing the overall power consumption footprint of the system. To this end, the power saving Deep Sleep mode of the MCU has been fully exploited. The solution proposed has been found to be scalable, cost effective and energy efficient, which makes it viable for mounting on both mobile, as well as static platforms.