High-Level Project Summary
Homeowners with solar panels installed are not able to gauge the benefits of Solar. People are in a dilemma whether to buy solar panels or not as they fear it is completely dependent on weather conditions . Even though NASA provides data access based on statistical parameters, difficult for commoner to understand the data. In order to solve this problem, we have developed an application which utilizes NASA power data to provide temporal based time series visualizations based on statistical parameters such as temperature, humidity etc.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
The app allows the home owners to compare their solar panel output with solar irradiance at their home. This helps them to plan installation and monitor efficiency of solar panels.
The functional steps of the app are as follows:
- Get the desired user location
- Get the time period (Start and End Dates)
- Access NASA POWER API to retrieve data.
- Populate the time series chart accordingly
- Users can move the data by using Pinch Zoom Functionality
Benefits:
- Users can visualize local solar irradiance from home.
- Compare energy generated by solar panels with their electric consumption and calculate savings in energy.
We hope to achieve that more and more homeowners switch to solar energy for domestic purposes. This will ensure a more sustainable environment for the future generations.
Tools used/ Software: Android Studio Arctic Fox 2020.3.1, Git
Coding Languges: Java, XML
Hardware: HP Pavilion 6 laptop with Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6200U CPU @ 2.30GHz, 2400 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)
Space Agency Data
We used NASA prediction of Worldwide Energy Resources (POWER) APIs to fetch the "All Sky Surface Shortwave Downward Irradiance". We used http client libraries in Android to query the APIs and get the json response. We parsed the json object to retrieve the necessary information.
Hackathon Journey
We learnt to work collaboratively as a team on a project in such a short deadline. We specifically learnt how to handle graphs, fetch the data using APIs. We managed the entire SDLC cycle such as Requirement gathering, scoping out the features, system design, coding, testing, and deployment. We live in a city which receives abundant sunshine but there are very few homeowners who have installed solar panels. Our hope is that is to promote consumption of renewable energy sources in the United States.
References
- https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/places/android-sdk/autocomplete
- https://github.com/jjoe64/GraphView
- https://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/DatePicker
- https://material.io/components/date-pickers/android
Tags
#solar #sunshine #renewable #arizona #NASAspaceapps
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.