The UK's Finest Independent Forum for Shooters and Gun Owners. Est 2010.

Not gun related but a bit of a "lockdown" project to keep me amused. I've been trying to design a self powered Heliostat, these Heliostats are quite common in Germany and are becoming more popular as energy prices continue to increase.
The idea of a heliostat is basically a mirror that you stand in your garden so it reflect sunlight into a north facing window, of course if it's just a mirror you would need to adjust it every 10 minutes as the sun moves round, so a heliostat is a mechanical means of adjusting the mirror so the reflection stays in the same place. All the heliostats I have seen have been complicated computer controlled things driving linear actuators and programmed with sidereal time and astro tables.

I'm trying to go the other way - very basic. This starts with a couple of small solar cells driving a small geared 12v dc motor, this can be arranged to track the sun. I've then used that to drive the reflecting mirror, geared down 2:1 so the mirror revolves at half the speed of the solar tracker.

Using just a single axis system to keep if simple I can't get it exactly right but I'm pleased with the project so far. The next job will be to make a cam system to compensate for the vertical error.
Here's a time lapse video of progress so far.
https://youtu.be/qqF_GgdUcmg

Cool.

like that

i need one of these to save half my lawn

We pass one on the edge of a farm from time to time, it is probably about 6m x 4m so a reasonable size.

Another little solar tracker project - this is a video about how the simple solar trackers I've made in the past work. This system can be scaled up to carry a decent sized solar panel or water heating panel. Tracking the sun with a simple single axis tracker like this increases efficiency by around 25% over a fixed panel. Increased complexity of a two axis tracker only increases output by another 8% at our latitude.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw4uEsEjbxA

What printer are you using keep thinking i 'need ' one

Dellboy wrote:What printer are you using keep thinking i 'need ' one

I've got two - the yellow parts for the tracker were printed on my old Tevo Tarantula - this was a bargain basement kit that needed building from scratch and cost less that £200 around 3 years ago, my newer one is a Creality CR10S-pro. I've had it for about a year and cost about £500, it was almost ready built and is a larger machine.

Both print well and I use the old Tevo more than the CR10. If you loved playing with meccano as a kid then you would probably get on alright with a kit but most printers now seem to come almost ready to go.

The Ender 3 for £250-£300 always seems to get a good write-up.