Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Optics Challenge – Design a solar concentrator for a non-round sun
Hi, I help run an academic conference on Nonimaging Optics (optics for optimal energy transfer in solar concentrators or illumination systems). This year, we are hosting a design challenge, and I thought it could be fun for some in the HN crowd to participate. Maybe some of you have ideas for completely different design approaches than what we typically see on the field. The challenge: Design an efficient "solar concentrator" for a sun shaped like the letters "XX" (instead of our regular round sun). The challenge is set up so that the ideal geometry would be 100% efficient*. However, we…
The Optics Challenge invites participants to design a solar concentrator optimized for a non-circular sun shaped like the letters "XX." Hosted by an academic conference on nonimaging optics, the competition tests… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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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 · its alternatives →
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Hi HN - My name is Andrew, and I'm a high school student. This is a write-up on StratoSpore, a payload I designed and launched to the stratosphere. The goal was to test if we could estimate physical altitude based on algae fluorescence (using a lightweight ML model trained on the sensor data). The blog post covers the full engineering mess/process, including: - The Hardware: Designing PCBs for the AS7263 spectral sensor and Pi Zero 2 W. -The biological altimeter: How I tried to correlate biological stress (fluorescence) with altitude. - The Communications: A custom lossy compression…
Nov 2025 · radi8.dev · its alternatives →
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Virtual Sun▲101We built CircadianLab, a free in-browser tool for lighting design. It uses webGPU shaders to calculate melanopic equivalent daylight illuminance (mel-EDI, formerly EML, relevant for circadian rhythm and WELL v2 compliance), photopic illuminance, UGR glare per CIE 117, and actual daylight through windows and skylights. It has a database of 400,000+ IES files from 81 lighting manufacturers and supports easy sharing of scenes/configs with other people. Daylight uses the NREL Solar Position Algorithm and a Perez clear / intermediate / overcast sky model, mixed into the same…
2020 · innerscene.com · its alternatives →
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Hello HN! We’re a small creative studio specializing in real-time 3D experiences. Netlify approached us to design and build an interactive experience to celebrate reaching 5 million developers. Inspired by the classic game Marble Madness, we created a gamified experience where users control a ball through playful, interactive levels. The goal was to blend marketing content with the look and feel of a game to engage users. The app is built with Three.js [1], using our custom render pipeline and shaders, and uses Rapier for physics simulation [2]. The 2D content is overlaid on the WebGL view…
2024 · 5-million-devs.netlify.com · its alternatives →
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An introduction to non-line-of-sight imaging, and how to create images of hidden objects around a corner in under 10 minutes!
2019 · analytech-solutions.com · its alternatives →
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PixelSpace▲68A tediously accurate scale model of the solar system
2014 · joshworth.com · its alternatives →
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When building a 3D scene using libraries such as Three.js we generally use meshes. You define a geometry attach some material to it to…
2023 · varun.ca · its alternatives →
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The latest 3Blue1Brown video [1] about the M. C. Escher print gallery effect inspired me to re-implement the effect as WebGL fragment shader on my own. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldxFjLJ3rVY
Apr 2026 · static.laszlokorte.de · its alternatives →
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This is a GPU "software" raytracer (i.e. using manual ray-scene intersections and not RTX) written using the WebGPU API that renders glTF scenes. It supports many materials, textures, material & normal mapping, and heavily relies on multiple importance sampling to speed up convergence.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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A high-performance solar phone charger
2015 · kickstarter.com · its alternatives →
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Abe pitches his crowdfunded solar startup to Adam Draper
2016 · thepitch.show · its alternatives →
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Finding funding for small commercial solar.
2016 · soundcloud.com · its alternatives →
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I didn't realize Universe Sandbox ran on MacOS, and I was in the mood to play around a bit. Some functions it's got: - Random system generation - Sonification is super fun too - Habitability Simulation (Just for fun, don't cite this please) - Replacing, spawning, deleting objects I've had tons of fun building this, so I hope someone else can share the joy. It's free and runs in the browser. I'd love to hear any feedback. I think this is at a state where I might leave it as it is, but if people are interested in other features, maybe I'll keep working on it. I've kept saying I'll stop working…
Dec 2025 · luna.watermelonson.com · its alternatives →
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- 19IB
Mar 2026 · structuredlabs.github.io · its alternatives →
- 20WP
This was my recent weekend project, aimed at teaching me JavaScript, a bit of HTML5, and (mostly) WebGL. The orbital data are from NASA JPL. I was inspired in part by this Flash app: http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/orrery_2011_bce.swf, but wanted to do something in 3D. Coming from the games-dev world, this is my first introduction to web coding. The UI is jquery. I mostly used http://learningwebgl.com/blog for the 3D stuff. Being WebGL, it will work mostly on Chrome, Firefox 4 Beta. Forget about IE. I needed to figure out how to render text to the WebGL canvas - I…
2011 · solar-system-explorer.com · its alternatives →
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2024 · old.reddit.com · its alternatives →
- 22RV
While studying Geometric Algebra I have built some interactive visualization to demonstrate how geometric transformations (rotation, scaling, translation) can be constructed by just composing reflections. Accepting reflection as the most elementary geometric operation was an eye opening moment for me. I think some of you might enjoy the interactive visuals.
Aug 2026 · static.laszlokorte.de · its alternatives →
- 23LS
2018 · satu0king.github.io · its alternatives →
- 24SP
Context: I'm looking at Norman Wildberger's rational trigonometry[1], and here I was wondering how useful it is in physics. So I thought about testing it with the famous simple pendulum exercise. It's not obvious we get any FPS gain, but still I find it cool to even be able to get the same result differently. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_trigonometry
2016 · grondilu.github.io · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Homemade automated solar concentrator alternatives
- I turned algae into a bio-altimeter and put it on a weather balloon alternatives
- Virtual Sun alternatives
- A Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game we built for Netlify alternatives
- Wave-based non-line-of-sight computational imaging in Julia alternatives
- PixelSpace alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →