Solar Projects

This Sketchup plugin will rotate either an object or a face to match the user's selected altitude and azimuth.

This can be useful for astronomy, archaeo-astronomy, and solar energy designing. (6/26/10)

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 been simulated.

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)

On this page you will find a plugin for Sketchup which will allow you to simulate how light rays reflect from a surface.

I wrote this plugin to experiment with different types of solar collection designs, but I'm sure that it can be used for other things as well. (12/13/10)

This page shows off some experiments done with the Sketchup Light Ray Reflection Simulator Plugin. If you have an interest in solar energy and like to tinker, this plugin could be a big help for when you design your next solar project. Hopefully, some of the experiments featured on this page might just give you some ideas for what that project might be.

Here is a Ruby program that calculates the altitude and azimuth of the sun along with several other values along the way.

The solar panel sun tracking machine in the left picture was built by Sid Frantz. Sid and I have been communicating back and forth by email in an effort to get the Open Source Arduino Controlled Sun Tracking / Heliostat System to work with his machine. There have of course been hurdles, and there are still likely more to come, but, for the moment at least, it seems to be working!

This page contains a quick overview of the tracker’s mechanics and electronics.