giving pulse to stop a stepper motor

[Flower]

Hello

i am working in a project using labview 8.2 which tracks the sun using stepper motor based on equations.

once the program will be started, it'll assume that the solar panel which will rotate by the motor is in east direction so based on the date and the time it will rotate till it finds its correct position. it moves with steps 24 hours which is waste of power so i want to modify the program such that it will stop at night and again start rotating the day after.

i was wondering if you can please help me

Looking forwaed to recieving from you

<i have attached my program with name stepper motor controller.vi in the folder>

[mross]

Hello Flower,

I am also building a sun tracker so I am interested in your project and progress. Perhaps we can stay in touch about this going forward.

Unfortunately, I did not find the attachment you mentioned. It has been a while since I used LAVA - in the past it was necessary to upload vi's to the LAVA storage area where interested people could have access to it.

I originally planned to have my tracker stop at sunset (sunset can be in a lookup table or calculated) and cycle to a park position (collector in a horizontal plane to reduce wind loads overnight when it is not necessary to track the sun) until it is time begin the next day.

I may decide to park sooner than sunset - also to save power. I will be monitoring Precision Spectral Pyranometer (PSP) and Normal Incidence Pyrheliometer (NIP); when the solar irradiance drops below a minimum value my testing is finished for the day and it is time to rest.

I am not using steppers for my project. I report position of the collector platform by using absolute encoders. One is for the solar hour angle from due south, the other the solar zenith angle from directly overhead my location.

The motion of my collector comes from linear actuators (worm gear screw jacks). I will just jog the linear actuators into position according to what the encoders report and what the equations say is necessary for the time of day, date and geographic location.

In either case (by your method or mine) we must have a decision in our program that depends on a time of day or some other datum which signals time to go to a new day position or a park position.

If you can give me access to your vi, perhaps I can help.

Michael Ross

Edited March 28, 2010 by mross

[Flower]

Hello,

this is my file.

Looking forward to recieving help

Last Program.zip