Space Apps Challenge 2017

Go check out some images (and source) on our github repositories!

Portions coded in swift and for iOS are available here This is our consumer based product with some installments for moving forward to Explorer mode.

https://github.com/NASADreamTeam/YouAreMySunshine

And this is our explorer based product in Android. You'll learn more about the modes below.

https://github.com/shaunramsey/SolarEnergyPlanner

You can see a few more screen shots of both apps at those repository links, but here are a couple links to our favorite screen shots:

Consumer Main Screen:

Consumer Info Screen:

Explorer Main Screen:

The Solar Energy Budgeter (SEP) is a mobile application for Android and iOS designed to facilitate understanding and budgeting of energy needs in a predictive environment. Equally usable by HI-SEAS teams for training, homeowners wanting to better understand their energy usage, or astronauts in a Martian environment depending on solar energy to survive.

We've designed SEP with two modes: Consumer and Explorer. These modes target different types of users and allow for varied engagement with the application.

In consumer mode, SEP allows you to visualize the energy usage of household appliances as a function of solar energy. You can visualize the energy available to you given your solar panel arrays and use predictions of solar energy in your location over the next day to help understand how appliances will consume the available solar energy from a typical solar array on a consumer's home.

Consumer mode displays the standard application, using default averages from U.S. homes for its data calculations. These are done with averages for solar panel size, efficiency, number of solar panels and predicted solar energy power during a given day. Here, you can calculate and visualize how much energy you use on those marathon Netflix binges. SEP can then explain that energy usage with comparable use examples. For example, want to know how much power it takes to have an hour long shower? It's the same as keeping on 285 CFLs for an hour! Curious how long it would take an average solar panel to generate that much energy? 16 hours (although that'd likely take more than a day and you'd likely have more than one panel).

Explorer mode provides an in-depth view. We provide users with customization access to the data used for power demands of applications and availability of energy based on solar panel data. Users can alter their solar panel sizes, efficiency and the number of solar panels. This version was intended for simulated extraterrestrial environments where energy will be limited and need to be rationed. Explorer mode allows a user to create a customized energy budget that takes into account the change in available power based on the time of day. We think of explorer mode as the expert view of the application. It is a wonderful tool in planning for those high energy or low energy days.

Resources used so far (Props to them for the open source availability!)

ColorBrewer: http://colorbrewer2.org/

We used ColorBrewer to help us configure the color scheme for our application's icons.

Solocast: https://solcast.com.au/api/docs/radiation.html

We used Solocast to identify solar radiation by location, tied to our mobile app data calculations.

NREL: https://nsrdb.nrel.gov/nsrdb-viewer

We used the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's viewer to identify and understand the data related to solar power and availability across the world.

EIA: https://www.eia.gov/

We used the data available from the U.S. Energy Information Administration to get the wattage calculations for the appliances we used.

donrowe: https://www.donrowe.com/usage-chart-a/259.htm

We used this data as one of many sites to research wattage calculations for appliances we used in our application.

Energy.gov: https://energy.gov/

We used the data available from the U.S. Department of Energy to research the wattage calculations for the appliances we built into the mobile apps.

Energy Use Calculator: http://www.energyusecalculator.com/

We used the data available from this site to get wattage calculations for appliances we used. Ultimately, we compared these values to other values from other sites. Most of our calculations use this sites' wattage calculations.

App Development Tools:

X-Code - IDE for Swift development, Swift for iOS

Charts Library: https://github.com/danielgindi/Charts

Android Studio - IDE for Android SDK development., Android SDK using Java

https://stackoverflow.com/: As always, immensely useful when digging into new languages and development environments. A must for us all!