Space Apps Challenge 2017

Solar Vision is comprised of four freshman from UNH and one graduate from Northeastern. During the day of the Space Apps challenge, we met and formed our team. Within a day we had a working website which can be used to calculate a solar arrays efficiency based off many external factors.

We wanted to accomplish many things within this website. This includes the following:

• This website is supposed to help the average solar panel owner to understand how many appliances he can use at any given moment: simplicity is key.
• It suggests optimal times throughout the day for common appliances.
• Users that are “off the grid” can maximize their panels’ efficiency.
• Weather data and trends are used to estimate the energy that will be produced during that day.

For this prototype, sunrise and sunset data was collected from Hawaii to determine the sun's intensity at a given time based off of the users time.

In the future our plan is to get a better solar intensity equations that can be used at any location. There will also be collected data from energy consumption over time to recommend energy consumption tips to save you power and money.

Using the website is easy and effective and takes little time. Here's how it works:

1. You input specifications of your solar panels
2. You add different appliences within your home
3. Determine if the aplliances are running all day or not
4. The webiste then calculates whether or not you can use your appliences with your current power output

There are several pages within the website; here are the main ones:

Panels

Add panels with information such as the type and total power rating in wattage.

Appliances

Add appliances based off of name, power rating, average time used (min), and whether or not it is used all day.

Can I Use?

Select the weather based off of cloud coverage and select which panels and appliances you are using. See whether or not the appliances can be used based on your current power supply.

Analysis

This page is not yet created but our goal for it is to add a program which calculates recommendations of future appliance usage based off of the future weather conditions.

How It Works

This is a basic lesson with photos of how the website works and calculates the results.

We used solar data given to us by NASA to develop the equations to determine current sun exposure to a solar array in Hawaii.

https://agile-depths-75767.herokuapp.com