Luminal Caliber

Dhaka | You Are My Sunshine

Sunshine

High-Level Project Summary

Team Luminal Caliber is proposing an Android/iOS Application, Sunshine, to ease the accessibility of data related to solar energy to the masses. It uses the data provided by NASA’s Prediction of Worldwide renewable Energy Resources (POWER) web portal and presents them to people in a more useful manner. Not only does this app help people with knowing solar energy more but also encourages them to go for it through different useful features. It is also expected to be a great tool for the commercialization of the field. Sunshine app will help to empower and encourage solar energy among mass people and assist to keep track of the system of the installed solar system.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://youtu.be/3dUePGlVR0w

Link to Final Project

https://github.com/BRAINIAC2677/Sunshine

Detailed Project Description

Project Overview

Sunshine app will help to empower and encourage solar energy among mass people and assist to keep track of the system of the installed solar system.


Features

Solar suitability of a location:

The users can check the solar suitability of installing solar panels of a particular location from our Sunshine app. After choosing the location from the map, a user can visualize the historical solar irradiance data and other useful relevant parameters like temperature, humidity, wind flow of that location and decide to install a solar panel system. This will be done by calling the necessary API from NASA's POWER web portal.


Calculating the required number of solar panels:

When the user is convinced about the solar suitability of his location from the app, it will also assist the user in determining the required number of solar panels for his particular location and power consumption. The user will input the monthly power consumption of his residence and the wattage of the solar panel he is intending to use and the app will give an idea of installing how many solar panels will support how much percentage of his residence power consumption in a user-friendly way.


Keeping track of the installed solar panels:

The user can keep track of whether his/her installed system is producing the optimum power or not from the sunshine app. The user will create an account. Then he can note down the reading of daily power generation from the inverter of the installed solar system and input it to his account. These user data will be stored in his account. After that, the user can see the comparison of power generation of his system and the sunlight coming from the sun in his location for any previous day(as long as the solar irradiance data of that day is available on NASA's website). If anything is wrong with the solar panel system, the user can easily identify that from this comparison.


Encouraging lowering of carbon footprint:

When the user is saving his/her power generation data for a particular day, the app will also show him how much carbon footprint he/she is reducing by using solar panels for that day. The user is being aware of how much he/she is contributing to the safe-keeping of the global environment.


APP INTERFACE

Home Page

  • Introducing Sunshine
  • Getting started


Visualizer

  • Changing the current location from the map.[default location is set to the user's location]
  • Choose the parameters(solar irradiance, temperature, humidity, temperature) to visualize.


Parameter's Page

  • Choose on which basis you want to visualize the data. [daily, monthly, yearly]
  • Change the range of the visualized data


User Account

  • Sign up if you don't have an account otherwise login to your account.
  • Input the power generation data of your solar panel system by clicking Input Daily Data.
  • Check the comparison of your inputted data against the sunlight reaching your location.


Solar Calculator

  • Input the monthly power consumption in kW-hr of your residence and the wattage of solar panel you are planning to use.
  • Hit the calculate button to see the suggestions about the number of solar panels for your setup and the amount of power they will support.


For the full app demo, click here.


Run Application on IOS or Android


Coding Language:

  • JavaScript


Tools Used:


Goal

Our main goal is to create a global clean energy ecosystem. Our target audience is the mass people. We seek to ease the accessibility of solar energy-related data to the masses and introduce people to it in a more pragmatic way. 

Living in a time when we are constantly witnessing the rise of sea level with melting polar ice, when we are getting ravaged by scorching heat and chilling cold due to climate change, a source free from carbon emission is nothing short of a blessing. This opportunity can’t simply be pushed away.


Treating sunlight as a natural resource just like oil, gas is a must. The barrier standing in the path of commercialization of this invaluable resource is the complexity of getting started with solar energy. This is where our app plays a key role. By making data easier for people, it will interest and incentivize them to rely on this new form of energy. Public interest is accompanied by the fact that sunlight data is easier to deal with now thanks to the app, there will be more investment in the solar energy sector in these sunlight-rich areas of the world. Besides the obvious upheaval of the economy, it will get us closer to a better energy sector. App Sunshine is proud to orchestrate an easier shift towards a safer and cleaner future.

Space Agency Data

Sunshine mobile application mainly uses three kinds of data, namely, the solar data from NASA API, location data from google, and firebase for storing user data.


NASA API DATA

This app tracks the user's location or gets a selected location selected by the user. According to this location and giver parameters, the NASA API endpoints are called. The used API calls are briefly discussed here:


  • For solar fluxes data, the app uses the "All-sky surface shortwave downward irradiance" parameter. This data is being collected according to the user's selected time range and temporal, eg, daily, monthly, and yearly basis.
  • For temperature data, the app uses the "Temperature at 2 meters" parameter which gives the temperature within 2 meters range of the user's location.
  • For wind data, the app uses the "Wind speed at 10 meters" parameter which gives the speed of wind flow within 10 meters range of the user's location.
  • For humidity data, the app uses the "Relative humidity at 2 meters" parameter which gives the relative humidity within 2 meters range of the user's location.


GOOGLE MAPS DATA

The app tracks the real-time location of the user upon permission. The user can change and select any location from the map. This whole location system is based on the data provided by GOOGLE MAPS. The interactivity of location and any other map-based operation is from google maps implemented in React Native Expo.


FIREBASE AS USER DATABASE

This app also uses a database system in order to implement user authentication and store different data of an individual user. As a database, the app uses FIREBASE FIRESTORE and FIREBASE AUTHENTICATION. Any user can store daily solar data generated by his solar panel. This data is stored in firebase and used to show stats and comparing the expected data calculated from NASA API.

Hackathon Journey

It was not a sudden jolt, but from time to time some incidents have pushed us to work hard for a cause like this.


The most prominent one was some time back when one of our team members got an inquisitive question from his little sister aged 6. When she was watching the television, suddenly she came across a local program which happened to be explaining something related to fuels in layman’s terms. The line that caught her attention said, “Fossil fuel is going to end within 53 years, the alternatives are not very enriched yet either. If you have a child, s/he will probably face this stern reality in their adulthood.” Now we probably would wave this information away, as we are always doing, but her curious mind did not. She became extremely anxious about it and was asking her elder brother tons of questions about what today’s adults are doing for them. This incident made our teammate realize that every person this day should soon stop being selfish and start thinking about the future generation. 

All our team members are from Bangladesh, a third world country. It is one of the few countries which are in the most danger of going underwater because of polar ice melting. We felt motivated to do something useful with our knowledge and expertise that might help our country and the world tackle this problem of climate change. 

 

Now all these experiences or realizations were scattered across different times, before the advent of the Space Apps Challenge. After that, when we came across the challenges for this competition, we immediately knew this was the challenge for us to take. 

 

We feel privileged to progress in this journey with so many new learnings and experiences. It was the first time the 6 of us worked together as a team, although we knew one another previously. It was a great experience to work on such an impactful cause with a collaborative team. As part of the project, we have had to explore different corners of climate change and clean energy, and we do not regret a single bit of it. We realized how the absence of a single application/platform caused the rift between NASA’s absolute gold mine of data and people using it on a large scale. We discovered how people’s enhanced accessibility to data would accelerate the shift to cleaner energy and how it would allure commercial investments. 


But it needs no telling that the journey was not so smooth. Due to our academic engagement, we were in a sense short in time. And only after starting to work on the project, we realized how difficult things can end up being. At times, we were falling short of connecting the dots. We had to put a good amount of effort into getting hold of NASA’s humongous amount of data. Thankfully, we came out well and have been able to present a working solution.

 

We would like to thank NASA and our local organizers for arranging such a wonderful competition. It was so much fun, yet so much learning for us to participate in our first-ever NASA Space Apps Challenge. We cannot wait to take part in the upcoming editions as well while the current one is still on.

References

Data:




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Resources:



Tags

#solar_power, #nasa_api #reat_native, #renewable_energy, #data_visualization, #solar_irradiance, #solar_panel_calculator

Global Judging

This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.

You Are My Sunshine

NASA produces a variety of surface solar and meteorological data parameters that are useful to commercial renewable energy and sustainable building ventures, but this information is not easily accessible to the typical homeowner. Your challenge is to develop a mobile application to access the information on NASA’s Prediction of Worldwide renewable Energy Resources (POWER) web services portal and provide useful information about sunshine to the general public.