Like this, but cheaper and more manual, and portable.Something that runs off car's mirror adjustment motors, and maybe 12v battery and "trickle charger" Solar panel. And maybe a "trainable" smart phone based app. Position in at sun-rise and sun-set and let it fill in the blanks, and do that once a month. Or, with a bit of calculation and maybe AI, if it figure out how to correct for changing seasons. Its just gonna be a little basic trig. Or just a Remote for fully manual operation, but Remote probably needs at least 50ft range from inside house.Mount on plastic saw-horse, and put a couple sandbags over the horse.https://www.instructables.com/Heliostat-Reflects-Sunlight-Inside/The device then provides a webserver at the address heliostat.local which can be opened with a web browser.
All that work for your remote CP server doesn't really make sense when you could just store it in your Morrowind data files folder on your local machine.
>"trainable" smart phone based app>Position in at sun-rise and sun-set and let it fill in the blanks, and do that once a month>and maybe AI>Or just a Remote for fully manual operation, but Remote probably needs at least 50ft range from inside house.Peak 0/diy/ dekinai
I liked this ideahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL9PcGu_xrAappealingly simple
>>2999435The simplest is not having a solar tracker, because it only improves solar yield by 15-30% in critical months depending on your lat, and increases cost and complexity at least by an order of magnitude more than that. Trackers are only worth it if you are extremely constrained on space or can implement it very cheaply across large deployments to improve total yield. Putting a tracker on a small IoT application is a demented idea that shows that you absolutely do not understand the core issue you're trying to solve.
>>2999440Indeed, PV panels are cheaper and longer lasting than a tracking mechanism.However, OP's picture looks more like a mirror, so I presume the goal is sunlight rather than electricity.
>>2999440are solar trackers really that complicated?it doesn't even really have to perfectly track, just rotate a bit based on the time of day for a significant yield increase.kinda crazy to me that this hasn't been solved simply yet.
>>2999458It has been solved simply, but solar panels are effectively cheap but heavy recycled garbage that produce comically small amounts of energy, so moving them is comparatively expensive.
>>2999458It's not that it's complicated, it's that if you need 30% more yield, it's far easier and far cheaper to get 30% more solar panel. And out of the 30%, one axis gets you to about 20% already, so the second axis is even harder to justify. On ultra-small-scale where you're powering IoT stuff, the panel price difference is basically negligible, depends on luck what you find in your range, and on normal scale a 400W panel is ~$50-70, the normal mounting equipment is about $50-100. A single axis tracker would make that cost at least double if you /diy/ it with scrap, a dual axis would probably be 400-1000% because of complexity and all the joints having to withstand wind loads.If I was deploying a ground mount array, I'd maybe /diy/ a single axis tracker, because under certain conditions thresholds can be tripped where there are cost savings elsewhere (i.e. if you are near the rated DC input voltage of your inverter, adding another inverter is much more money, plus you can clear snow with tilting) but this only concerns very large systems (by residential standards).
>>2999465i dunno, you always see people harping about the % efficiency of their solar panels. if it were really that easy to get 30% more yield EVERYONE would have them but every solar installation i drive by is all static mounted.it must not be actually that simple if nobody is doing it.
>>2999511You somehow missed the whole point after several posts saying the same thing. It's EASY but not CHEAP. If you are buying a 5kWp system and you decide you want 30% more power, you cana) buy 3 more solar panels and install them, $300 ($800-1000 commercially)or b) install a solar tracker for $1500 ($4000-10000 commercially)
>>2998356Maybe this shows my own ignorance but given sunrise / sunset and sun movement across the sky are predictable, why not set a controller that points at the where the sun will be on a given day and time?
>>2999543Because OP sucks dick for a living.
>>2999543It's not you, this whole thread is being retarded.>>2999531>buy 3 more solar panels if you want to boost yield by 30%Brainlet. All he has to do it buy one solar panel that is made of better material and has higher yield while using roughly the same amount of space.
>>2999564Yeah, tell that to the guys designing satellites, too. Brainlet scrubs at NASA and SpaceX using 30% efficient solar panels, they don't realize they could just buy 100% efficient solar panels and save 70% on area and weight.
