Some amazing engineer built a drone that can lift its own weight using only the electric power that it gets from an on-board solar panel and nothing else (no battery).
Video: I Built a Solar Powered Drone and it WORKS by Luke Maximo Bell
This is excellent, now pair it with a lightish battery to fill in any gaps in sun exposure and add lora and this is the start of emergency deployment of meshtastic. Imagine just tossing one of these up and it can stay up all day.
Oh and give it the ability to switch to glider mode so it can “land” without damage.
I wonder if you’d find this video interesting: RC Solar Plane Flight Duration Test
Uh no. This thing is really fragile and at the limit of what’s technologically feasible. It won’t survive in any real world application.
Yet.
yeah it’s really really fragile. they show it in the video, one of the panels broke because a cat stepped on it. obviously not very suited for real-world deployment.
however i do wonder why they use polycrystalline silicon and not just amorphous silicon? I mean 20% efficiency instead of 8% makes a difference but i did some rough maths and it could still work with amorphous silicon if you use the area on the drone better. But amorphous silicon has the advantage of making a very thin and flexible layer that doesn’t break easily. It’s essentially more like a flexible piece of cloth instead of a solid object. Maybe worth a consideration.
It’s still fun to think about this stuff, maybe just maybe it will be feasible in far future.
Just don’t bring it out on a windy day or the solar panel would turn into a sail real quick
This boat can move with the power of wind alone, just using this big sheet! No motor or oars necessary! Just don’t bring it out on a windless day.
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I watched this last week and the moment where he breaks the panels by touching them is priceless.
I honestly fail to see how this is surprising? Why shouldn’t a drone be able to that? (Genuinely asking)
Because solar panels powerful enough to run a drone are large and heavy, and/or fragile. A solar panel sufficiently lightweight to be lifted by a low power drone, and simultaneously powerful enough to supply that drone, isn’t easy
Ah, so the tricky thing is to find the balance between weight of the drone and the weight of the solar panel and its capacity, yes? I thought it sounded like “wow, look what solar power can do”, as if the actual source of the energy made any difference :)
Yeah the problem is more with the weight of the components and how little energy is in that small patch of sunlight. To provide enough thrust to hold it up is impressive, not just that a solar panel is providing power.
the thing is that the amount of power on that little patch of area is actually a lot; we just continue to underestimate it because it doesn’t feel like much. i mean, we stand under direct sunlight all day long and never feel like a train hits us. however, the amount of energy in the sunlight is quite a lot, we’re just very good at ignoring it.
because people seem to think that you need to have big areas to generate meaningful amounts of energy. this proves that’s not the case.
