1 Sunny Side

Universal Event | You Are My Sunshine

Awards & Nominations

1 Sunny Side has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

Happy Sun App - A lightweight mobile app to check if a location is solar power friendly

High-Level Project Summary

Getting Solar Panels can be intimidating. How do you know if it is right for you? How much does it cost and will it be worth the investment. It really seems like a real hassle.So, we set off trying to create a light-weight app that can check if your location is good for sun. But not only if it is good but how good is it. Is it amazing and you don't even know? Well we figured out that with access to NASA data we can give estimates right in your hand with a simple native app. Our goal was to get this project live in 48 hours.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://www.figma.com/proto/zrpTg0pMkpg4C6hP7opdsJ/Happy-Sun-Hours-App?page-id=0%3A1&node-id=2%3A9&viewport=269%2C48%2C0.43&scaling=scale-down&starting-point-node-id=2%3A9

Link to Final Project

https://github.com/rrbbrb/nasa-happy-sun

Detailed Project Description

We wanted to create an application that helped users find out if a location was great for solar power. We wanted the application to be user-centered, simple and light-weight. But above all we wanted it to actually work so you right now as a reader can open up the app and check it out for yourself.

Here is a simple explanations of how the app works and some core functions:

For design: Figma

For code: Visual Studio Code, React Native and Expo

API:s : NASA POWER

Hardware: Phones and Laptops from the Apple Corporation

Space Agency Data

We used NASA's POWER data to obtain the monthly average irradiance data of a point of location and visualise such data in a line graph in our application. We also use this data to calculate the year-round total irradiance that a location would receive. Such data isn't accessible or easily understood by non-professionals, therefore inspired us to work on this project from a UX point of view and help our users understand it via relatable anologies.

https://power.larc.nasa.gov/

Hackathon Journey

We started by discussing what project would be interesting to test out with the skillset that existed within the team. With two designers and one developer we thought one that was heavy in the thinking and concept aspect would be a good fit. Also it isn't every day one is able to create a yellow application.

We continued by breaking down the industry beginning with the capitalist arm, the solar panel industry. Then we tried to understand what user cases they were trying to solve for. There was a great blue-collar organised company that installed solar panels around the Long Island area that we broke down in order to understand. Their main selling point to consumers was that this will lower their electricity bills to nothing or near nothing. This gave us an insight into two different aspects. The first being that it can be intimidating to invest in a project when as a user you don't very much and secondly that the first step is to understand or figure out if the location you are in is good for solar power.

With these two insights we looked at location applications that made it easy to find your location or search for locations. We looked at Uber Eats and tried to figure out what made their location navigation so powerful. Then we started drawing up the app logic based on this.

The idea was to build an application that would first help find a location easily and secondly help the user to understand if that location is actually good for solar power.