Solar panels are an emerging source of renewable energy, but they often accumulate dust during use that decreases their efficiency significantly. Our team designed a solar panel dirtiness sensor for Dr. Mike Bergin (Duke University Professor) and Michael Valerino (Duke University PhD Student) to determine when solar panels require cleaning, in order to maximize energy output.

Existing industrial solutions are expensive (over $8,000) and large (around a meter in length). Additionally, previous teams have tackled this problem with a Raspberry Pi and a backup clock, which proved cumbersome and time-consuming to set up. With our solution, we hope to tackle these existing problems and create a low cost, easy to set up, functional sensor.

To mitigate the global problem of dust accumulation on solar panels, we created a small, easy to setup sensor that captures magnified photos of dust on a glass slide at specified time intervals.