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Solar Projects

It is oftentimes difficult to predict exactly where the sun will be during each of the four seasons.
To help make things easier, here is a simple Sun Finder tool which will do exactly that, find the sun. (12/20/09)

At the time of this writing, it is the middle of spring and I have just finished cleaning out my greenhouse so I can start growing plants in it.

Along the way, I decided to take a few pictures and give some information on it.


Here is a Sketchup plugin which will draw the path that the sun travels for one day.

It does this by first calculating the sun's position at the moment the plugin is run and then adding one half hour and redrawing it repeatedly until 24 hours have passed.


I decided to take a few screenshots of the Sketchup Sun Position Plugin in action.

I used different latitudes so that anyone viewing this page can get an idea of how the sun travels across the sky in different parts of the world. (12/19/09)

 
This page will show you how to find your latitude and longitude and also how to convert the values into decimal degree form if needed.

A DMS to decimal degree converter program has also been provided on this page to make the conversions easier. (7/10/10)

 		 
 

Old Solar Projects

Here are some of my older solar projects. They are all largely obsolete as I have since moved onto bigger and better ideas. I'm leaving them up here though for nostalgic purposes.


Note: Try this program first.

 This program calculates the sun's position every minute for the rest of the year and outputs it as G-code

The G-code is then loaded into EMC2 and used to keep two stepper motors oriented toward the sun.  

It may sound complicated to the uninitiated, but it's totally doable. I'll go through it step by step so you can try it for yourself if you want.

This quick tutorial will show you how to set up EMC2 so that it can be used with the sun tracking program.

I designed and built this machine so I could try out my sun tracking program and be sure it worked.

I created it in Sketchup and brought it into the real world with my CNC.

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