Space Apps Challenge 2017

SOLitude: https://github.com/illuminos/SOLitude

Solitude represents the loneliness that an exploration team experiences when they perform great research for mankind. This app allows a team to determine their power performance over the course of the mission, with a simple, beautiful interface. The goal is to allow teams to be able to plan their activities in a way to maximize their efficiency.

The app does a few steps to do so. First, the user selects their location. Currently, the app only has data for the HI-SEAS team, but more data can be added in the future. Next, the team selects which devices they plan to use for the day. As the user selects more objects, the system automatically calculates the amount of energy each action will take. A helpful battery display on the right side allows the user to view how much energy they have remaining to use. The amount of solar energy for the day is calculated based on the user's location.

The app uses react.js and redux for the front end. React is used because it provides the user with a clean and responsive experience. The json file acts as a database and contains information on different items the user might use on their journey.

Plans for the future:

In the future, users will be able to register devices that they own which are not in the database. This can be done by using Google's free data service, Firebase. This gives us a simple API that will be able to push and pull from the database as needed. This has the added benefit of letting users add objects that other users have

The database contains information on the cost and weight of each object. This means that when a user registers their object, a simple calculation will allow the user to see the current cost and weight of all the equipment. While this is not immediately useful for the HI-SEAS team, it would be useful as a guide for other teams attempting to develop missions to study similar environments.

Currently the solar energy is calculated for HI-SEAS alone. Using a online API called Solcast, one can find insolation data that would be useful for any user by using a simple API request. To use this, they charge $6000, which is not within the scope of our project. However, this would be useful if the app were to be used by a larger team in the future.

Another feature to be added is the ability for the user to see how much a solar panel can really power. This is done via a simple calculation where you divide the user's current daily output by the voltage of an iPhone 6S (6.55 Wh). This should give the user a great sense of how useful a solar array is.

In the future, the calculation for energy will also take into account the actual size of the solar array, which is stored as a integer when the user first logs in.