This last Tuesday Leonardo and I present at the 2016 ASES conference in San Francisco. The conference we an absolutely amazing experience for myself and I plan on attending another as soon as possible. During the last conference a lot of networking was done. The first companies we contacted were those on the bottom floor. Meyer Burger was a cell production company that are optimizing photovoltaic cell for solar panels. Neo Solar Power were one of the next companies we talked too. Neo Solar has 355W panels that were relatively similar in data as the Sun Edison panels we were considering for our calculations. Hyundai Solar Modules also caught our attention however there panels have a relatively low voltage and low wattage for our applications as well as a lower module efficiency. Smartflower POP is definitely something i'm interested in, it has an effective opening and closing design as well as a beautiful aesthetics to it. One very interesting maintenance possibility that was using  the RMUS Solar Inspector Pro which is essentially a quad-copter designed to maintain and support a solar pane system. ECOLUX and LOSERChemie have developed great methods for simple PV recycling. PFalz Solar was a company that was mass selling to city grid systems, something we may be able to replicate in our applications. Tectonic was a support company that is wanting to assist us in electrical installations, generation calculations, and similar calculation that SAMs does for us currently. Similar to tectonic, Greenlancer has a support system for our entire installations and manufacturing. As for batteries, there were more batteries companies than solar panel companies in my opinion. Some companies we looked at were Fullriver AGM battery, Herewin storage, an electrIQ which has an AC/DC inverter as well., SIMPLIPHI smart-tech battery, and BMZ energy storage to name just a few.. One company I think we may want to implement is NHR, a regenerative grid simulator company. There simulations machines are around 30,000 so that may be an impinging factor to our decision to use the simulation. Lastly we got information on all the electronic components from QuickCables and "blind" connectors form CombiTac. After the networking session we had our presentation in which we went over all of our calculations, designs, and future ideas we have of the transit system. All in all it was a very memorable opportunity for me.

This week I was working on the racking system for the solar panels. I designed a track like the picture below.  The track on the left is designed to be installed on a different area than the one on the right.

 There are two track for the solar panels rack. One of the tracks will be on the far right or far left of the rail and the other track will be connected to the support beams that hold up the rails. I designed one track to utilize the ribs on top of the railing as support and the other one to utilize the support beams. Each track will use the same “CAM LOCK” mechanism that is essentially a 90 degree lock and opening mechanism As Shown Below. On the track connecting the support beams; there will be three of these Cam Lock that connect to a support plate on each of the support beam .

 

For the support best track, there will be a connecting mechanism that slides inside of each support beams, and becomes drilled into the support beam. The connecting mechanism allows the cam lock to tighten the support beam plate as shown below.

I am now working on a gearing mechanism that allows a robot to turn the central Cam lock on the support plate and results in turning the two exterior cam locks; reason for this is to make labor close to non.