31–40 of 143 posts
I'll just leave this here... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL9PcGu_xrA&t=174s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiADday0mDA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_motor
tl;dr - sun rises, temperature rises, wax material expands, motor actuates, solar panel tracks the sky as if it was a sun flower. Maybe the gloop is sentient or something.
I'd like to see a comparison with a dumb as a box of hammers controller like PI or extremum seeking on the local gradient. I can't imagine that it is learning much more than a simple strategy like this, but maybe that's my lack of imagination...
Correct. Basically all the gimbal is doing is minimizing the cosine loss. This is, literally, the simplest loss function possible. Even if you don't know where the sun is, damped gradient descent will solve this problem every time, with no learning required (albeit with some jitter because you're having to estimate the gradient by moving the panel around). If you treat it as an iterative learning control (ILC) proble…
I'll just leave this here... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL9PcGu_xrA&t=174s
I'll just leave this here... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL9PcGu_xrA&t=174s
Nowadays panels are cheap enough that if you want more power than you get with them fixed in place, you just add more panels.
Sorry for the off-topic. I think if just 10% of the efforts were put on improving mini/micro/pico hydro electric generator rather than on solar systems, most of the rural areas will probably better off now with reliable power supply than relying solely on the intermittent solar power[1], [2]. [1]Micro hydro: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_hydro [2]Micro hydro power with turgo generator: https://youtu.be/njNYuE…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nowadays panels are cheap enough that if you want more power than you get with them fixed in place, you just add more panels.
Are panels cheaper than the servo motor & Arduino used in this tool? Not to mention that at mass produced scales chip costs are usually 1/5 the price of an Arduino. What if every panel used these tools, we could increase the amount of power we gather from solar.
Given any GPS coordinates, couldn't one simply calculate the location of the sun in the sky to point directly toward it?
My general approach is if we're not doing X and it sure seems like we could simply do X, we probably cannot simply do X.
Given any GPS coordinates, couldn't one simply calculate the location of the sun in the sky to point directly toward it?
Yes, here is one example of such a site https://gml.noaa.gov/grad/solcalc/ Here is how they do it. https://gml.noaa.gov/grad/solcalc/calcdetails.html
Isn't this exactly the problem that can be better solved using real power data instead of values expected from theory ?
I'll just leave this here... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL9PcGu_xrA&t=174s