High-Level Project Summary
Our challenge was “You are my sunshine”. NASA provides 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 by general people. So here we had 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. To solve this challenge we created a mobile app(ios, android) that will take user's locations and it will show meteorological data for that particular location. It will also calculate user solar panel needs according to the user's given
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
The name of our app is “Helios” named after the Greek sun god. We wanted to make our app user-friendly and as simple as possible. By starting our app it will ask for your location access permission. After giving the permission the users will have to input their location. The app will show temperature, longitude, latitude, and solar irradiance for that particular location. Here we used an open weather app API to get these values. On the home page, there will be two buttons one for calculating the solar panel needs and the other is to graphically show various data which was retrieved from NASA’s Prediction of Worldwide renewable Energy Resources (POWER). On the solar panel page, the app will ask for the quantity of basic household electronic devices (ex. Fan, Air Conditioner, Refrigerator, Light). We are taking this data because we want to know how many devices the user will use by using the energy from the solar panel. By taking this information we can also estimate average energy usage. On the solar panel page, we can select the number of electronic devices that we normally use and also input the power of a solar panel in watts that we want to install. Our app will give you the estimated number of solar panels that you would need to install in your home for your devices to function properly and it will also give you an idea of the energy you will get every hour from the solar panels. We are calculating the number of solar panels by multiplying the energy usage which we have estimated from the user’s input and data of peak hour (1peak hour=1000w/m2) which we can get from the solar irradiance, then dividing it by the wattage of the solar panel that the user wants to use. To calculate hourly energy we multiplied the solar panel wattage and peak hour. In the graphical page, the app will show the graphical representation of the last 7 days’ data which we have retrieved from NASA’s Prediction of Worldwide Renewable Energy Resources (POWER). Here we will show solar irradiance, temperature, shortwave irradiance. General people can easily access and understand power data by using our app. And also they can calculate their solar panel needs. By using their preferred information they can use this in their daily usage.
To develop this app we have to use the Flutter UI development kit, we have used “Dart” as our programming language and for IDE we have used Visual Code.
For hardware, we mostly used intel core i-5 processors and on average 8 GB of RAM.
Space Agency Data
We are using NASA's Prediction of Worldwide renewable Energy Resources (POWER) web services portal to get desired parameters through API calls. We are getting the data of the given parameter, temporal resolution, and the time period in JSON format which we then decode and use further in our graphical representation as well as other calculations.
Hackathon Journey
Our space app experience has been a hectic journey. It’s really something to work on challenges of this caliber. From this challenge, we learned more about solar energy, its usage, what are the parameters to get maximum energy out of solar panels, information about surface solar and meteorological data, and many more. Our team is from Bangladesh. Our country’s energy system is fully dependent on power grids. There is a very small amount of renewable energy involved. Which led our country to a nationwide blackout on November 1st,2014. We chose this project so that we can do something and make changes in our countries energy resources. Our approach to the project was mainly to give users a simple and useful data representation app. We faced a lot of setbacks in the journey. Our mentor helped us through the journey and we successfully collaborated with each other to solve the setbacks.
References
Open weather API, Wikipedia, NASA’s Prediction of Worldwide renewable Energy Resources (POWER), and various tutorials/videos from Youtube.
For tools, we used the Flutter UI development kit and Visual code as our IDE.
Tags
#solar_power ,#solar_energy, #solar_panel, #renewable_energy
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.