Solar Tracking for IoT
From MSc thesis to IEEE GLOBECOM paper — low-cost solar tracking for wireless sensors.
This started as my MSc thesis at DCU in 2010 and turned into a PhD research project at Imperial College London. The idea was simple: wireless sensor nodes need energy, solar panels work better when they face the sun, but tracking mechanisms are expensive and power-hungry.
I designed an open source, low-cost, low-power solar tracking system with an adaptive algorithm that doesn’t need prediction models. It was published at IEEE GLOBECOM in 2017 and has picked up 14 citations. Not world-changing numbers, but it’s honest work.