The invention discloses a time-controlled single shaft tracking apparatus comprising a photovoltaic panel installation rack, a rotating shaft, a power-driven device, and a time-controlled device. The rotating shaft makes rotation and simultaneously drives the photovoltaic panel installation rack to make synchronous rotation as well as correspondingly adjusts a direction angle of a solar photovoltaic panel. The power-driven device drives the rotating shaft to make rotation once every 20 minutes, wherein an angle of the rotation of the rotating shaft that is driven every time is 5 degrees. And the time-controlled device controls the power-driven device according to a control mode that is arranged in advance and realizes that an included angle between an incident direction of the sunlight and a normal direction of the solar photovoltaic panel is always controlled to be less than 5 degrees in a day. Besides, the time-controlled device comprises a sunlight incident port, a photoelectric detector, a photoelectric detector window, a sunlight reflector and a controller. According to the invention, the apparatus has advantages of simple structure, reasonable design, simple operation, reliable performance and high operation precision. And moreover, defects that exist in a current photoinduction tracking system and include high cost, large power consumption, and small generated energy and the like as well as defects that exist at a fixed mounting type solar photovoltaic panel and include low generation efficiency and the like can be overcome.