I thought this ingenious invention might interest some folk on here:

The SunSaluter is a solar panel rotator designed for the developing world. Using only the power of gravity with a water clock, the SunSaluter enables a solar panel to passively follow the sun throughout the day, boosting energy output by 30% and producing four liters of clean drinking water.

https://www.sunsaluter.org/

  • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.orgEnglish
    27·
    6 个月前

    Principle: water clock, see-saw balance. Water drips from a bottle through a mechanical filter, reducing its weight and continuously swaying the solar panel. Needs to be refilled in the morning of course.

    By the way, the thumbnail pic shows a misadjusted one, that solar panel is very much not facing the sun.

  • marcos@lemmy.world
    111·
    6 个月前

    If only we managed to put some electricity generator there somewhere, we could avoid the trouble of having to fill that water bottle every day…

    • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.orgEnglish
      23·
      6 个月前

      You only need one axis for the daily movement (it’s not horizontal except for the rare few days between the tropics but you can modify the design to use a slanted one). A manual yearly movement can be done by having the user move a lever to the next date mark when refilling the bottle every day.

        • DontRedditMyLemmy@lemmy.world
          9·
          6 个月前

          Earth rotation is, by definition, about a single axis. Therefore you only need one to track it. You are neglecting the possibility of an array normal that isn’t perpendicular to the axis of rotation.