remipch

Thanks for your nice comment.

Yes it's definitely fun to build one and use that free energy from the sun.

I was particularly happy to eat my first solar gratin :-)

Exactly

This has the advantage of requiring fewer motors (only two motors for the entire panel) instead of two motors per mirror.

The disadvantage is that the light is only focused for a few hours a day.

Interesting, do you have any links about this startup ?

You say it's more expensive, do you have a rough estimate of the cost of such a panel (with or without motors) ?

I'm asking because I'm currently working on a small scale automated solar concentrator and I haven't managed to get an idea of how much such a panel costs.

I have only found some sun trackers for photovoltaic panels but they have different angular accuracy requirements than CSP.

It reminds me of "Le Pipotron" [0] (in French) that made me laugh when I was younger. The goal was to make fun of political bullshit.

"Meaningful nonsense" is much more evolved and beautiful.

Thank you Amy Goodchild for the detailed explanation.

[0] http://lepipotron.com/

Yes, that makes sense, it should take a long time to get it working.

Is it possible to "simply" power a few electromagnets to see a few numbers spinning?

Anyway, you're right, ideas are infinite, time is not. It's good to choose what we spend our time on.

Are you tempted to try to repair it and get it up and running (even partially if it's possible) ?

Hi !

I came here to post your article and found you did it already.

Thank you, it's full of interesting details and beautiful pictures.

Computer science is old enough that we can do "computer archeology" nowadays.

It feels like you found a treasure from an ancient civilization and try to understand what it does and how it works.

How did you obtain it?

If I had a plotter, I'd try a few things with plotter.vision.

It converts a 3D STL file to SVG with "hidden wireframe removal".

There is also an "anaglyph" mode to output red/blue lines to be seen in 3D with red/blue glasses.

The online converter: https://plotter.vision/

More info from Trammell Hudson, the author: https://trmm.net/Plotter-Vision/

Yes, it's close to an iPod Shuffle but my grandmother cannot use an iPod Shuffle, it's too complicated for her with 5 (too small) buttons.

Thank you.

I had fun making this little toy project, I felt like a software artisan assembling some simple existing pieces of hardware and software.

It's a refreshing change from complex professional projects that take months to complete.

And Mamie Colette loves it too !

A minimalist MP3 player for my grandmother.

The whole user interface is a single physical button on her desk :

- ON : indefinitely play all MP3 files randomly

- OFF : stop playing

The longest task was to find her favourite pieces of music from my aunts and uncles.

https://github.com/remipch/radio_colette

It looks promising.

I like the way each algorithm is explained with minimal example and demo images.

I'm looking for such a lightweight vision lib to embed simple image manipulation programs on tiny ESP32-CAM boards.

OpenCV seems too heavy to integrate on such small devices.

So far, I've been able to develop simple image processing programs with CImg[1] (simple filtering, image cropping, adding text).

I'll try to spend some time exploring this SOD lib, thank you for sharing.

[1] https://cimg.eu/