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You’d think that solar energy and clouds are not the best match, but in this project I’ll show you how you can make it work!

The future is here, solar panels everywhere! In the last couple of years a lot of photovoltaic power station have been built, but usually they are using fix placement and thus the solar panels rarely receive the light in the optimal, 90 degree angle.

I wanted to do some experiments on how I can create an inexpensive solar tracker solar panel while I can remotely control and monitor the results.

Another issue I’d like to handle is the negative energy price at peak production hours. It is just as big of an issue as the lack of power as overproduction can damage the electrical network and its connected devices.

Safety first
A lot of thing depends on making systems like this safe. A failure caused by hackers can be very dangerous and expensive. A cascading failure can bring down the electrical network, so we really need to use safe and reliable services here.

Huge botnets were built from IoT devices due to inadequate protection. Among others, Microsoft saw the demand on the market for a safe service to operate these devices, to take the advantages of tech, without its dangers.

And this is how we arrived to Azure Sphere. It is a secured, high-level application platform that includes integrated communication and security features for building Internet of Things solutions. The platform consists of secured crossover microcontroller unit hardware, the Azure Sphere OS operating system, and the cloud-based Azure Sphere Security Service that provides continuous, renewable security.

The brain
In this project I’ll be using the Avnet Azure Sphere MT3620 starter kit. It is a great and powerful device that is great for experimenting with the Azure Sphere SDK. It contains numerous sensors, wifi, an OLED interface for 128x64 displays, two MikroE Click board expansion sockets, a Grove connector, etc. For a full description take a look at the previous link. It would be too long the mention all of its capabilities here.”

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