Help with code please

@will I don't think we ever saw a photograph of the completed barrier and photo resistor setup. Also the only code I ever saw was demonstrated to be either insufficient or totally wrong.

I can also tell you that trackers are not in favour for large commercial operations due to cost, cheaper to just lay down another panel. Back when panels cost 4x what they cost today there was some justification but no longer. I have even seen an installation that had north facing and south facing panels in 45+ lat country since a lot of mid year sun is in the north.

@ianns 5 A, is that a typo? I never heard of one that small, mine is 70A and 150V but then I have 1,080 Watts of panels (I know I should have got the 90A, I screwed up)

@zander @ianns

It's the principle that interests me 🙂 I'm thinking of designing a 4 sensor tracker (for horizontal and vertical movement) as another potential project. My condo faces north, so I may have to sneak it onto the roof for testing 🙂

I can see where tipping panels to correspond to the latitude of the collector would provide an improvement in power and also in helping remove dust, leaves and other detritus by assisting their removal during rainy periods. I don't know what extra risk that would introduce in areas of high winds. But I understand your argument that the power used to align the panel would probably use up more power than was gained, so that's a no-go.

@ianns Do you have a battery monitor? They are so important I bough my first one before I owned an RV, before I owned the batteries. Really important for FLA. 

BTW, if your batteries are not Trojan T105's, they likely are the wrong type of battery. The easy way to tell is look at the battery, if it has the initials CCA, MCA, or words Cranking Amps it is the WRONG battery. Deep discharge batteries have a few very thick plates, cranking batteries have a lot of thin plates. Golf cart batteries (mostly Trojan T105's) are the gold standard. 2 of them for RV operation because they are 6V but for IoT one because 6V is perfect for a 5V or 3.3V regulator. With 112.5 usable Amp Hours feeding a less than 1 amp weather station they can run 4 days without any charging, and if you only take readings every 5 to 15 minutes and go into deep sleep in between then probably weeks of power so a very small solar panel will be dumping most of its power on sunny days. Without the battery monitor however it's all a guessing game, voltage is a very coarse measure and requires expensive accurate meters, expensive accurate thermometers. A shunt measures literally every electron. 

@zander No 5A

It did everything it should after the 3 stage set up procedure.

@will I have some familiarity with RV automated tilters. They are only one axis because of the very poor payback of EW tracking and more expensive tilting mechanism. I have never seen a commercial solar farm use trackers recently. When the cost of the panels was 4x higher there was some justification but not today. We always recommend an RVer to just add another panel. I have manual tilters that I will now never use because my plans have changed and I am in a heavily treed location pointed in the wrong direction. My rig is heavily metered so if there is interest I can produce graphs for any time of year from my previous location that was almost shadow free and the tilters provided some optimization but we were pointed 180 degrees wrong so the tilters had to first compensate for roof lean, still worked well though. Also, the use of an MPPT charge controller and panel wiring that emphasizes voltage over current can produce a significant boost. Modern panels are MUCH more shade tolerant so the series wiring penalty is vastly reduced whereas the common insufficient wire gauge will always penalize the parallel arrangement.

@will I think to be honest the only videos worth watching are the ones Bill posts.

Some of the others are a waste of everybody's time.

@ianns Not sure what you mean, but ok, good luck.

@zander Any of the many solar tracking videos on youtube is what I meant.

@ianns 

Bill is definitely one of the best for making projects with uControllers and interesting sensors and modules.

But there are other areas of interest and other points of view, so it's worth checking out other videos as well. I have a couple of dozen that I watch, but they don't all post regularly, so some days I come up dry and other days I have more than I can watch in the time I allow.

So, please don't stop looking yet, there's more valuable content waiting for you to find it 🙂

@ianns FYI @will  I watch most of the Swiss Guy of course, and have subs to another 2 dozen but rarely check on what they are doing. When I do there will be some stuff of interest but most not of interest. Just not enough hours in the day to feed my brain.