Well it was a lot of work, but it looks like the PCB design for the Arduino “Sun Harvester” shield is finally close to being finished. Despite having checked the circuit at least a dozen times, I still managed to miss some of the connections on the I/O expander. Thankfully though, this is something that is easily fixed with a couple of point to point wires soldered in.
I still need to test a couple of things, but so far everything seems to work.
The stepper power control boards are also working. I will probably update the design to use larger screw terminals for the motor wires though. It’s difficult to get the thicker wires into the holes with the terminals I am using here.
Things are looking good so far. Overall, the process of setting up a Sun Tracking / Heliostat electronics system goes a LOT faster with the Sun Harvester shield. What I need to do next is to set up some heliostats to see how well it works “in the field”, but more on that later.
