Power Gen PDR:

Diagram:
Old Design:
New Design:
- Rather than having each individual sensor be wired to the main sensor board, we will be daisy-chaining the breakout boards. This allows us to add more sensors if needed while also ensuring proper connections, especially since our irradiance sensor runs on I2C. Each of the breakout boards will have a connection to an irradiance sensor and a back-of-the-module temperature sensor. The irradiance sensor will be placed on a mini PCB on top of the top shell, then wired through the shell to connect to the sensor breakout board to be properly read from for I2C communication.

Diagram:
Old Design: Perturb and Observe algorithm. This algorithm directly increments/decrements the voltage depending on whether the previous step increased or decreased the power. It has relatively successful benefits, but cannot perform as well during partial shading systems, where part of the array is under sun and other parts are shaded.
New Design: Creating a mathematical equation by modeling irradiance telemetry data to guestimate max power. We then can use a hybrid of fuzzy logic or particle swarm to estimate. We are changing the design because under dynamic shading, the conventional algorithms will struggle to find the max if it settles at a lower power when there is a sudden deviation in power. Using the mathematical equation to guestimate max power, we can keep running the algorithm until we find the optimal power. We can also tune weights dynamically when shaded to get reduce the amount of steps to boost, thus reducing the amount of time to find the max peak.
- **Include rational (why we are changing the design)**

Diagram:
Old Design:
New Design:
- The old design did not have uniform lighting nor was the light intensity strong enough to accurately simulate the sun.
- **Include rational (why we are changing the design)**