SolarSpec

Chittagong | You Are My Sunshine

Awards & Nominations

SolarSpec has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

SOLARSPEC : Enhancing lives with solar energy

High-Level Project Summary

Our project SOLARSPEC aims at solving the "You Are My Sunshine" challenge. SOLARSPEC is a user-friendly application that helps a user to get proper information about total solar energy along with other parameters upon users' location. It helps a user to find where to install solar panels or plants for ensuring better sunlight and output as well. The data can be saved also for later usage. We are using Google's Geocoding API to get a user-specified location and view the historical data of solar energy and other user-defined parameters which are collected from NASA’s POWER Project. The novelty of this project is that it is not so hard to find solar information as existing NASA's Data Ac

Link to Project "Demo"

https://youtu.be/RDS0m7qW-kE

Link to Final Project

https://github.com/logolica99/SolarSpec

Detailed Project Description

The challenge we solved is "You are my sunshine". Our aim is to make solar energy adoption easier by building an app that extracts NASA’s data and gives consumers important visualization. Right now, mass consumers are not able to get the benefit of the powerful database of NASA because it requires technical understanding and digging through hundreds of parameters.

We want to make it super easy to navigate this data and draw important decisions.

VISIT and INSTALL OUR APP => (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rM5cx16PJ6pG3q9rNU1n_KrKjWHKsB3l/view?usp=sharing)

Let's hop into our app.

By default, the app will show the user's present location.

HOME SCREEN

The user can also search for other locations and the map will navigate to that precise location. Here we have used Google's Map platform for the map and location search

SEARCH SCREEN

Upon pressing the Check Data button a dialog would pop up and the user would be asked for the total estimated Area (which also can be kept empty).

AREA POP UP

When the GO button is pressed the app will take the user to the Data screen where he/she can view the total energy that can be produced and view the graphical data of solar irradiance. Our app fetches data from NASA POWER Database, analyzes it for the users’ queries, and presents the information with easy-to-understand and powerful visualizations.

DATA SCREEN

Users can also choose a custom time period.

When the user presses the Save for later button the results will be saved inside the user's phone's database and

can be viewed in the (saved) tab for future reference.

SAVE SCREEN

How we developed the app?

Android APP =>

React Native
Google Maps platfrom

Space Agency Data

Solar energy usage has been elevated in recent years. The use of renewable energies, especially solar energy can make a greener world by demolishing the excessive usage of fossil fuels. To explore the undiscovered sector of solar energy we were determined to make an app that will be a bridge between solar datasets and general people.

Therefore we found the NASA Prediction Of Worldwide Energy Resources (POWER) web access services where there were the relevant data and parameters we wanted to implement. NASA POWER data along with its parameters is obviously a goldmine of data but it is still impractical to mass consumers of solar energy. So, to make better use of those data we processed it in making a practical and understandable format.

The Google Maps Platform is also used to complete our app, SolarSpec.

NASA Prediction Of Worldwide Energy Resources(https://power.larc.nasa.gov/)

Google Maps Platform ( https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation )

Hackathon Journey

NASA Space Apps Challenge 2021 came to us as sudden news and the impact of NASA on mankind has inspired us to join the hackathon.

The team learned a lot of things in this journey. Mainly the growth of our hardworking spirit has been uplifted so much by joining this hackathon. The ability to do work in time has been radically improved and confidence was gained by us. To develop an application matching to one of the challenges was our main aim during this hackathon and we did it precisely. We had to gain knowledge about developing the application and how to make it much better by using NASA Data. Moreover, the presentation skills also mattered for us and we have overcome them in time.

The use of renewable energies, especially solar energy can make a greener world by demolishing the excessive usage of fossil fuels. The excessive usage of fossil fuel still playing a huge role to lessen the earth’s lifetime makes us terrified. From this perspective, we were motivated to go for solar energy which is an attractive & harmless sector of renewable energy and mass people can easily be motivated to use solar energy for their daily needs. Therefore, the challenge “You Are My Sunshine” was the perfect match with our thought.

To develop this project, our first approach was to ensure the prerequisites and features that we have got from the Challenge Description. After that, we researched those preconditions and features and started to implement them in our app interface. The development of an app named “SolarSpec” was the true hardworking event for our team with proper guidelines and we have been successful to maintain those all terms.

Whenever there were any stopping factors we tried to resolve them with proper discussion with teammates and our mentor. These long discussions have made our problems come to an easier solution.

We would like to give our warm gratitude to NASA for arranging this hackathon. Furthermore, we are grateful to the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services(BASIS) for paving the path towards the NASA Space Apps Challenge and full-time mentoring support. We also want to thank our mentor, Oli Ahad, CEO of Intelligent Machines who was really affectionate and helpful to us.