Fall
The very first two weeks of the term were spent learning about the project scale as well as what our client's expectations. The team met with the client, started breaking up projects, and by week 5 focused on individual research and design processes, and this continued for the rest of the term. We finalized our engineering requirements, customer requirements and the power budget. By week 10, we all uploaded our work to the google drive and updated our client through email.
Winter
We began winter term by deciding what blocks we want to check off. We all then worked on our individual blocks. Fortunately all of us successfully passed all our blocks. By this time we had our PCB design, enclose, GPS module, and all the parts works as they were supposed to. By week 7 we started to combine our blocks and parts. By week 8 we started our initial testing and started debugging and made some upgrades as needed. We then also worked on our initial poster and started to transition into spring term. Currently we have our first prototype ready for system verification.
Spring
Due to the resnt event of the COVID-19 pandemic, all classes switched to online classes inclouding the Senior design cource. In this term, we started wraping up our project as we finished testing 6 engineering rigiernments last term. We focused on this term on documanting all the important artifacts. The artifacts included the block diagrams, engineering requirements, code files, mechanical designs, and any other document that was created for this project. Also, we filmid the final summery video to present our project.
Executive Project Summary
During the course of the last academic year, we have put a prototype that includes much of the functionality that we were aiming for in terms of the engineering requirements. We were able to mount the solar panel to our enclosure with servo motors that allowed it to rotate and tilt. We were able to integrate a GPS and program the calculations required to calculate the position of the sun relative to a cardinal direction and used these calculations to autonomously move and rotate the servos to direct the solar panel to point at the sun. We created a PCB to handle the system’s battery charging and discharging process. We were able to compensate for vertical tilt and misalignment from south autonomously using a compass and accelerometer. The well communication between team members and our client helps us overcome all the obstacles. Our client Mark Reed and Huy Nguyen helped us a lot from the technical support to providing us some of the necessary parts. We learned much more than we expected, not just technical skills but more with management skills.