I'll just leave this here... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL9PcGu_xrA&t=174s
But this only works in direct sunlight. And the next day your panels are staring in the wrong direction.
the solution it's explained in the video
I built an open-source, AI-powered solar panel that's 95% optimal
91–100 of 143 posts
Re: I built an open-source, AI-powered solar panel that's 95% optimal
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> $3 per watt, installed on your roof is typical these days Which is why I was so fascinated by someone saying that you could get panels at 250USD/400W=0.625USD/W; I suppose it's possible that all the other stuff (electrician, mounting, inverters) is the difference, but a factor of 5? That feels like an chance to do something hacky and come out way ahead (like, say, DIYing a panel to run your computers, thus cutting…
Yes, a factor of 5 is fairly close. The prices of panels and inverters has dropped, while the price of labor and wiring has stayed constant or increased. The end result is the factor of 5 that you mention, and DIY systems are becoming more popular. One of the factors in cheaper solar is that the panels have gotten bigger. Panels grew from 250w to 300, 350, and now to 400w and 450w. The 450w panels are 82 inches by 42…
> I think that utility scale solar will eventually beat residential solar on price because of less labor per watt to install.
Utility scale solar beats residential solar by a huge margin already. New utility scale solar projects on the California grid are priced around $20/MWh [1] compared to feed in tariff rates of $0.08923/kWh = $89.23/MWh [2].
As a renter who can't have solar installed on my home I find it pretty objectionable that my electricity rates subsidise expensive toy systems of homeowners.
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/09/30/us-utility-scale-sola...
[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/features/archive/solar-incentive...
Re: I built an open-source, AI-powered solar panel that's 95% optimal
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A 400w watt panel is 250$. Wait, panels are that cheap? Could you point me to a good place to buy them?
$3 per watt, installed on your roof is typical these days: https://www.remodelingcosts.org/solar-panel-costs-increase-s... That includes labor, mounting hardware, inverters and grid tie in. It also assumes high efficiency panels. Watch out before buying older technology (lower efficiency) panels. Some have significant efficiency losses per degree Celsius increase in temperature.
> $3 per watt, installed on your roof is typical these days
In Germany, around 2019/2020 depending on the size of the installation it was around 1€ to 1,30€ fully and professionally installed on your roof. Right now with the increasing demand and very bad availability we are back at about 1,50€ to 1,80€ per Watt.
Re: I built an open-source, AI-powered solar panel that's 95% optimal
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something to consider is when adding more panels brings your total installation power over the limit of your net metering agreement.
The intverter should be able to be configured with export limits. In a lot of jurisdictions that's mandatory anyway. Still better to over-specify so that in Winter you get the full amount while in Summer you just throw some away. Or take up a power-intensive hobby like Bitcoin mining in Summer.
When do you think buffering batteries will be more profitable than throwing away surplus?
Re: I built an open-source, AI-powered solar panel that's 95% optimal
#95Given any GPS coordinates, couldn't one simply calculate the location of the sun in the sky to point directly toward it?
You're forgetting about orientation (and altitude)? The observed position also varies a bit with air pressure and temperature, but iirc that's less than a few degrees. Anyway, you grab yourself a nice ephemeris library like skyfield, do a little bit of your_location.at(now).observe(sun).apparent().altaz('standard'), and there's your angles. The trickiest part might be getting an accurate time on whatever cheap contro…
Radio time signal stations broadcast time and I would hope it would be cheap enough as we have radio controlled clocks, that do not cost a fortune. Otherwise a small battery and a RTC would be enough and probably a better solution.
Re: I built an open-source, AI-powered solar panel that's 95% optimal
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Any mechanism that moves the panel to follow the sun, must be sturdy enough to also withstand high winds, which is inevitably costlier than proof of concept ideas. Better to add more panels. A better way to ensure more power output is to have a set of panels with a small battery back to automate cooling of the panels and cleaning of the panels.
Another concept involving the cooling of solar panels and how to use the heat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dJixtZdkU0
Easy method to improve cooling of your panels is installing a sedum roof underneath. Plus such a roof has many more advantages.
Re: I built an open-source, AI-powered solar panel that's 95% optimal
#97Why? Surely the exactly position of the sun can be calculated?
Re: I built an open-source, AI-powered solar panel that's 95% optimal
#98I used to be like OP. (have a similar background and have similar interests in tech for the planet) Then I realised couple of things, an humbling experience: 1) given any position on earth, you can compute exactly what's the optimal inclination at any given point in time for a PV to maximize the energy production. Sure, there are reflection and secondary irradiation conditions (eg.: there is a lake close to it), but…
I went on a solar power course at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales (~10 years ago, so perhaps this into may be somewhat out of date) and they'd calculated that the extra energy generated by moving a panel to the optimal direction during the day was less than the energy it took to move the panel, let along the extra costs of the mechanics. Bear in mind that in Wales there's plenty of cloudy weather during the year, so light is often diffuse, and it's quite a long way north (the gulf stream tricks people into thinking the UK is further south than it is, but the CfAT is 600 miles further north than Toronto). If you're somewhere with lots of direct sunlight that calculation might be different, but as others have pointed out, that doesn't take into account the cost of the mechanics and controllers.
Re: I built an open-source, AI-powered solar panel that's 95% optimal
#99This looks incredible, could see this approach revolutionizing so many industries.
Solar followers have been around for decades and do not need ML or complex models.
Re: I built an open-source, AI-powered solar panel that's 95% optimal
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You can do this without jitter by having the panel with a bend in it and comparing power from the 2 sides. The difference drives a motor controller directly.
I raced solar cars in college. One car we built had a solar concentrator system made up of 1D parabolic mirrors. This was a several hundred thousand dollar system due to the use of specialized concentrator cells, and required multiple team members to temporarily move to LA for months to delicately manufacture the cells in a Spectrolab clean room.
The concentrator mirrors had to be aimed within about 2 degrees to aim the light onto the active area of the cells. I tried using a pair of photodiodes as the sensor, and it worked well in early prototypes. We flew out to Australia before the system was fully integrated into the car, though. In the real setup it just wasn't precise enough. On top of that, the aerodynamically shaped acrylic window surfaces created weird refractions and reflections that made the accuracy poor as well.
I had a couple weeks to figure something out, with a bunch of PIC18F4680 MCUs on hand, and access to parts from Dick Smith's. I ended up buying a small PAL security camera to experiment with. I went to a nearby photo center and got some overexposed film negative to use as an IR-passing filter. With enough layers of film, the camera image was completely black other than a white dot when pointed at the sun. Looking at the analog video signal on a scope, I was able to rig up a couple fine-tuneable voltage dividers and then use the MCU's dual comparator peripheral to generate interrupts on sync pulses and on white pixels. I could then count scan lines, and detect scan lines with the sun in them, giving me a Y coordinate precise to a fraction of a degree. I also got an X coordinate by timing between syncs and white pixels, but I didn't need it for control. I then mounted the camera on the concentrator mechanism, and wrote a basic PID controller.
It worked pretty well, and we were able to happily concentrate sunlight while driving at highway speeds.
It turned out the linear servo mechanism had a design flaw, where it would lose too much mechanical advantage at the extremes, and in the presence of road vibrations it would jam. We discovered this fairly early on in the race. Luckily I had wireless control of the motor over our telemetry system, allowing me to keep the motor from burning out. We drove a couple hours with the system jammed, taking the power hit over losing race time. Someone realized we would be driving over a "cattle grid" soon, and we had the idea to try running the motor at full torque to see if the shock would be enough to unjam the mirrors. It worked, and we suddenly started getting several hundred watts of additional power! After that day, we tied a string to the mechanism and routed it up to the driver cockpit. Whenever the mirrors got stuck after that, we simply radioed the driver and they gave the string a yank.