Vikasa translates to the opening or closing of a flower in Sanskrit, and is a project developed at the George Washington University by Zach Switzer, Ali Ahmed, Feng (Jason) Xiang, Aaron Patron, and Jacari Matthews. It is a portable solar charging unit designed and created in order to tackle the issue of access to clean and renewable power that arises in developing nations. It incorperates a Raspberry Pi Zero W as a computer for those in developing nations who do not already have a computer and as a controller for the function of the system as a whole, a solar array that expands and contracts through origami folding, and a battery pack with DC USB access. This project was supported and funded by Amar Hanspal, Makerbot, and Ninjatek. Special thanks to mentors who provided support and inspiration along the way including: Shannon Zirbel, Larry Howell, Megan Leftwich, and Kevin Patton. Very special thanks to Richard G. Hirst for the creation of ServoBlaster and Brandon Stafford for the creation of Pysolar, without which this portion of the project would not have come to fruition.
Pysolar can be found at: http://pysolar.org/ and https://github.com/pingswept/pysolar
ServoBlaster can be found at: https://github.com/richardghirst/PiBits/tree/master/ServoBlaster
This code was developed in Python 3 for a dual axis solar tracking system with 360 degree rotation in the x axis and 180 degree rotation in the y axis. It is meant to be used with 2 servo motors (each rotate 180 degrees) and employs the Pysolar and ServoBlaster open source programs in order to track the sun's movement and mirror it with motors.
This code was developed with the intent of being used on a raspberry pi and as a result it is assumed that both Pysolar and ServoBlaster have already been downloaded onto the modified (for Pysolar) linux computer and can be called upon and executed at will. For total system autonomy execute on the raspberry pi's bootup sequence.
This code was created for execution in Python3 and will not work in other versions of Python (Pysolar only works when executed in Python3).