Helios

Intro

The idea is more than 2200 years old; According to the legend in 212 AD, Archimedes used mirrors to concentrate the sunlight on the Roman sails, during the siege of the city of Siracusa, creating the myth of the "Death Ray" burning the fleet.

Since that time humanity has tried to generate mechanisms that follow the sun called heliostats. The first ones circa 18th century were mechanical and activated by clockwork mechanisms.

Idea

In recent years, heliostats have been used to reflect sunlight towards a fixed point and leveraging several of them, increase light, heat or photovoltaic efficiency. These consist mainly of flat mirrors that rotate through two-axis servo mechanisms that compensate for the rotation of the earth keeping the direction of the reflected beam fixed.

The objective of following the sun is based on the fact that the efficiency of radiation is proportional to a function dependent on the incident angle of solar radiation. This efficiency loss in a fixed and well-oriented panel is higher than 35% and can reach 40% compared to tracking devices.

At present, following the sun (generating an angle perpendicular to the rays of the sun) is a simple task is achieved by variable resistors activated by light (LDR) and linear or differential circuits that drive two motors or actuators that move the platform in two angles to follow the sun. These projects are many and mostly for the use on photovoltaic cells.

The idea of this project is more ambitious since it has the objective of creating low cost heliostats that allow to reflect the solar rays at a specific point, calculating the solar position and the corresponding reflection angles. This idea is based on the economy of scale that allows the use of digital printing (3D printing and laser cutting), digital controllers (Arduino, raspberry pi, etc.) and very cheap step motors that have appeared in the market in the last few years.

Helios II

Helios is based on the economy of scale that allows the use of digital printing (3D printing and laser cutting), digital controllers (Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc.) and very cheap step motors that have appeared in the market in the last few years.

Based on these ideas we developed a functional prototype, which can be seen in the following video:

Contact

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';