Alternatives
Products that do what OpenPV – Photovoltaic Potential in Bavaria (and Beyond?) does
Photovoltaic potential calculated live and privacy-friendly in your browser via WebGL. Using open LoD2 and laser point data from the Bavarian Public Agency for Digitization, High-Speed Internet and Surveying. Including laser points for tree occlusions and other non-LoD2 objects. Try it with the Bavarian Hall of Fame next to Oktoberfest: Hall of Fame, Munich, Bavaria Note that the point clouds might be a lot of data to download if enabled (~50 MB+). Currently limited to Bavaria, Germany. Thanks for your feedback!
- 1EM
I've been working on this project for about 4 years. It began as terrain only because world wide elevation data was publicly available. I then added buildings from OpenStreetMap (crowd sourced) and more recently from Overture Maps data. Some computer vision/machine learning advancements [1] in the past few years have made it possible to estimate tree canopy heights using satellite imagery alone making it possible to finally add trees to the map. The data isn't perfect, but it's within +/- 3 meters of so. Good enough to give a general idea for any location on Earth. Happy to answer…
2024 · shademap.app
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Plug-in solar panels (no electrician needed) have just become legal in the UK and will go on sale soon. Helios estimates how much electricity a typical installation could generate at a given address and what that's worth against your tariff. It uses UK government LIDAR data to reflect the actual skyline, so it knows whether there's a building or a hill blocking the sun. Caveats: - Outside LIDAR coverage (most of Scotland and Wales) it falls back to a synthetic horizon (less accurate). - Trees and recent developments (post-2022 or so) may not be in the data, and some address placements could…
May 2026 · helios.southlondonscientific.com
- 3AI
GB Renewables Map an energy experiment created entirely in my free time (day job is visualisation at Octopus Energy). It's an interactive map showing live generation for major wind farms in Great Britain, showing what each wind farm is generating both now and in the past, and where that generation is physically located. Animated weather data is from WeatherLayers and shows current and historic wind conditions on the map, providing context to wind generation around the country. History mode allows you to go back in time and see wind generation and weather conditions for a particular date and…
2023 · renewables-map.robinhawkes.com
- 4HA
Hi HN! I quit my job two years ago to have more time to work on my side projects. The main one is an automated solar concentrator. I've just open-sourced it, it's not perfect nor finished, and I still have a lot of ideas for further development, but I'm interested in knowing what you think of it. There are many applications where concentrated solar power could be a viable environmental and economic solution, I hope this technology will one day be more widely used. Feel free to give any feedback and ask questions.
2024 · github.com
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2022 · github.com
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2019 · sunlight.live
- 9IC
Last weekend, I tried creating an original visualization of something on many minds in my home country the Netherlands: land use. Much of our discussion revolves around land use—housing crisis, sustainable farming, solar energy—it's all about the land. To illustrate this, I created a map where each hexagon represents 0.06% (26,647 hectares) of land in the Netherlands. The color indicates the type of land use.
2024 · koenvangilst.nl
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Hi HN — author here. iesna.eu is a browser-based ecosystem for working with photometric data: parsing standard luminaire files (LDT/EULUMDAT, IES LM-63, Oxytech, ATLA-S001), running design calculations against EN 13201 / ANSI/IES RP-8 / CJJ 45 / IES-IDA MLO, and (the part I most want to show off here) rendering real urban scenes in Bevy with the photometric data driving actual streetlight behavior, including sky-glow contribution. The Skyglow Analysis demo loads a real LDT file into a Bevy scene (Khronos Bistro test asset). The luminaire's intensity distribution…
May 2026 · iesna.eu
- 12VW
We built a robotic plotter that creates ephemeral visualizations of website carbon footprints using water vapor on glass. It analyzes website energy data and translates it into misty patterns, making the invisible impact of digital infrastructure visible. Built during a residency at a cultural venue in Belgium. Code and build details here : https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/gijs/carbon-aware/-/tree/main....
2024 · vimeo.com
- 13IM
Looks like this year ePaper projects have been popping around[1], so this is mine. I made a photo frame with the intention of having a record of my family's history that can potentially outlive me. Knowing the challenges of long-lived digital projects, I consider this a moving target that will go through several iterations, but the first version showed encouraging results. I wonder if anyone else is interested in having something like that in their living rooms. More details:…
2020
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I made this convolution solver and visualizer tool to help get the parameters right when doing Conv2D / Conv2DTranspose. It also allows you to visualize the convolution interactively. Open Source code on GitHub.
2024 · convolution-solver.ybouane.com
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2024 · old.reddit.com
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Hey guys, A couple weeks ago, I was in Shenzhen, China for a hackathon and on the first day, we all used the one-day PCB fabrication to make PCB badges to wear during the event. I decided to go a little crazy and make some cool 3D alchemical-cosmological badges. It's 3 PCB's stacked on-top of each other that's connected using testpoints on each board. The innerboard has a 10 cent CH32V003 MCU that powers the WS2812B neopixels on the outer rings using the testpoints and shines through using exposed soldermask. If you have any questions about how the design works, feel free to let me know!
Aug 2026 · github.com
- 19WR
Made this video on our project which might be of interest to folks here! Happy to answer any questions. First time making a long-form video. Previous HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41235789 Video is also on PeerTube: https://spectra.video/w/4wTobcS16Ww5UAZVMWrC9E
May 2026 · youtube.com
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2025 · github.com
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Financial-grade solar analysis for your roof — in 3 minutes
May 2026 · roofsolars.netlify.app
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