August 30, 2012
Why solar alignment?
During the past two spring breaks, Bruce volunteered at an orphanage in Rongshui, China. On his first day there, he noticed that the children around him were shivering because the orphanage did not have adequate heating. The weather was so cold that it forced the orphans to sleep beside each other for body warmth. After spending a few days sleeping on a bamboo mat in the orphanage dorm, I knew I had to do something, but what could I do? I knew that I would go home after a week and that would be it. I knew that this wouldn’t be a good solution.
I realized that the solar heating panel on the roof of the orphanage could be moved to catch more of the sun's rays. More energy meant that the orphans would finally be warm during the rainy season. When the orphans left for school, I took a rickshaw ten kilometres to the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot and pulled out my laptop. After an hour of research, I found the best angle for the solar panel with an online program.
Using this angle as a guide, the orphans and I aligned the solar panel to face south. After awhile, I noticed that the dorm was warmer and that the hot water faucet finally worked!
When I came back to Calgary, I knew I wanted to create an internet free program that can calculate the optimal solar panel angle for this orphanage in Rongshui. With this program, the children would be able to use it to move their solar panel to stay warm and improve their living conditions. Right now, the solar panel is at an angle that is only good from March to early April. Thus, the orphanage needs to be able to calculate those angles anytime and anywhere without the Internet.
My Computer Science IB dossier was the perfect opportunity to create this program. Over a few weeks, with research and lots of lines of code, I had a working Java program that would print out the exact north/south and east/west angles for specific coordinates and a specific date, all without an internet connection: perfect for rural communities.
The only problem was that the program needed a laptop to run, and laptops are not as freely available as mobile phones are in remote communities. The obvious solution was to implement my algorithm into a mobile app so that it's easier to use. For that, I decided to approach Matt.
-Bruce
When Bruce first approached me, the thing I was excited most about was that there was someone else my age working on something cool and actually creating something of value.
Even though I had very little experience with making mobile apps, I decided I would do everything I could to bring the idea into life and agreed to work on the project. I immediately delved into Android tutorials and learned how to make Android apps out of pure necessity. About a week later, we had an app that took in coordinates, date, and time, ran the data through Bruce's algorithm, and output the two angles that aligned a solar panel directly with the sun for the location, date, and time provided. The app was very basic and ugly, but we were excited beyond anything I could describe. It was so cool to have the entire algorithm working on a smartphone. Bruce was especially excited to see his creation in the palm of his hand.
But we didn't stop there, we realized we could go further. Much further. We brainstormed for a bit and came up with the idea of using the phone's compass and accelerometer to help the users align their solar panels to the calculated angle in case their solar panel doesn't have markings or the solar panel is not on level ground. A few more days and we had that feature ready and working as well.
In the midst of working on the app, I stumbled on Eden Full, who is making really cheap solar trackers for developing countries. Basically, she was taking a hardware approach to the same problem we were tackling with a software approach, so I shot her an email, and we ended up having an awesome meet in August. And most importantly, she loved the app. :)
But something was missing. I couldn't pin point what it was. The app was only useful only for the time input by the user. Looking back at all the things I learned about startups and building products, I realized that the app wasn't truly useful. It displayed the angles for a certain time of day and that's it. That's when we came up with the idea for a schedule tool that would provide the users with angles to set the solar panel at certain times of the day, essentially allowing the solar panel to track the sun and capture a lot more energy.
As usual, the feature ended up being a much more complicated technical challenge than we first expected, but working through every obstacle, we were ecstatic when we got the feature to work properly. With the schedule tool feature added, the app is able to replace expensive solar tracking systems by providing the users with the angles to place their panels at throughout the day. Essentially, helping them manually track the sun.
-Matt
Watch for more blog posts in the near future!
