A solar panel that turns to face the sun like a sunflower — winner of the 2019 Best Semiconductor Mini-Project award.
- What: An Arduino-controlled rig that uses light-dependent resistors (LDRs) and a servo to keep a mock solar panel perpendicular to the brightest light source — modelled on how a sunflower tracks the sun.
- Who: Team-of-eight project led by Gyanesh Samanta. Teammates: Ankit Yadav (@annymehack), Rishal Ramesh (@Rishal16), Anumukonda Sowjanya (@Sowjanya1924), Pratiksha Ghosh (@PratikshaGhosh), Souharda Biswas (@TheSouharda), Chinmay Somani (@slammdesigner), and Sai Dhatri Byrisetti (@DhatriSaiB).
- When: Built in 2019 as the team's semiconductor mini-project; this repo dates from 2020-12-05 with cleanup commits through 2022-06-10.
- Where: SRM Institute of Science and Technology — Semiconductor Devices coursework mini-project.
- Why: Fixed solar panels typically operate at only ~40% efficiency because the sun's angle changes throughout the day. A panel that tilts to stay perpendicular to incoming light captures dramatically more energy.
Solar is one of the cleanest renewable sources available, but its biggest practical limitation is angle. A flat panel only sees peak irradiance for a short window each day; the rest of the time the sun's rays hit it obliquely and most of that energy bounces away. We borrowed a trick from biology: sunflowers solve the same problem by rotating their flower head to track the sun across the sky.
The build is deliberately small-scale — a cardboard square stands in for the solar panel, mounted on a servo arm and flanked by photoresistors. The Arduino sketch (Arduino Code/Arduino.c) reads the differential brightness across the LDRs and drives the servo until both sides see roughly equal light, leaving the panel pointing straight at the brightest source. We tested it by waving a flashlight around the rig as a stand-in for the sun.
The project won the Best Semiconductor Mini-Project award at its 2019 review, beating the rest of the cohort largely on the strength of the physical prototype. The main known limitation, and the obvious next iteration, is that the rotation speed needs to be tuned much slower for real, full-size solar panels — the current servo speed only makes sense at the cardboard scale.
- Microcontroller: Arduino (ATmega-based board)
- Language: C / Arduino sketch
- Toolchain: Arduino IDE
- Sensors / actuators: LDRs (photoresistors), servo motor
Arduino-Sunflower-Semiconductor-Miniproject/
├── Arduino Code/
│ └── Arduino.c # the tracking sketch
├── Pictures/ # build photos, circuit diagram, demo video
└── README.md
- Wire the circuit — follow
Pictures/Circuit Diagram.jpeg. You'll need an Arduino board, two (or four) LDRs with pull-down resistors, a servo motor, and a small flat surface to act as the panel. - Open the sketch — load
Arduino Code/Arduino.cinto the Arduino IDE. (You may need to rename it to.inoso the IDE recognises it.) - Upload — connect the Arduino over USB and flash the sketch to the board.
- Test — power the rig and shine a flashlight at it from different angles. The servo should rotate so the panel always points at the light.
- Slow the servo's rotation speed so the design scales up to real, heavier solar panels.
- Two-axis tracking (currently single-axis) for full hemispheric coverage.
- Log measured irradiance over a day to quantify the efficiency uplift vs. a fixed panel.
The project is archived, but issues and PRs are welcome — particularly upgrades from the future-work list above.
No formal license has been published. Please contact the team before reusing the design or code.
| Name | GitHub |
|---|---|
| Gyanesh Samanta (Team Lead) | @GyaneshSamanta |
| Ankit Yadav | @annymehack |
| Rishal Ramesh | @Rishal16 |
| Anumukonda Sowjanya | @Sowjanya1924 |
| Pratiksha Ghosh | @PratikshaGhosh |
| Souharda Biswas | @TheSouharda |
| Chinmay Somani | @slammdesigner |
| Sai Dhatri Byrisetti | @DhatriSaiB |