SolarDrones

Designing solar systems for commercial and residential applications by climbing on scaffolding and roofs is old school.

By bringing fixed-wing and copter-design drones into the solar space, we can map out in very high detail the qualities of potential solar sites to enable off-site designers to design solar systems for prospective clients without the necessity of a site-visit.

SolarDrones is looking to find coders/solution makers to think and code through this idea. If we get something great together, we would very much like to consider you to be part of the business that will follow through with this.

To build the first Solar Drone prototype we need to create a platform that can use onboard radio-telemetry of existing drone-technology to send data gathered by a drone from the air to a (yet to be designed) user interface on the ground.

The data collected on the drone is GPS positioning data, laser range-finder or LiDAR data as well as photography data. Through an onboard mounted computer such as the known "Raspberry Pi" platform, the drone collects the data on command from the operator (or in accordance with a pre-programmed flight/operations plan) and transmits it over the drone-mounter radio telemetry to a piece of software that collects images and embeds other data points into the META data. LiDAR is out of scope for the project but we consider it a natural next step in building the prototype.

Later stage prototypes will be mounted with other cool hardware such as heat-signature detection devices and shade-measurement devices such as the SunEye to provide installers with live-real-time-up-to-date-super-high-quality-imagery that engineers can use for designing solar systems.

Would you be the person that helps us create this software interface? We have (most of) the hardware. (Have drone and Raspberry Pi as well as telemetry hardware)

The Raspberry Pi (We have one which we imagine to be part of prototype 1) is a Linux platform system, but any and all types of software developers are welcome here. If you have any experience with hardware to software interface that's nice. Experience with drones highly welcomed. Experience in designing simple and easy user interfaces that tie into existing platforms such as the autopilot programming of the drone is good.

Please let us know if you like this idea and if there are any more clarifying questions we can answer at this time.