[MLB-WIRELESS] Solar power modelling

[Lyndon David]

Hi,

A week or so ago I asked a question about solar powering nodes and where to
get good data and simulation information. I got little response and several
I want to know as well messages. Here is what I found over the last week:

Solar data.
I was looking for good sources of solar radiation data.
http://www.squ1.com
A consultancy firm that appears to be part of Cardiff University in the UK.
They do tools and consultancy on building design. In there shareware section
they have a program called the weather tool. They also have available for
free download hourly data files of weather for lots of locations around the
globe. The unregistered version of the weather tool does not allow you to
export weather data to a text file. it is however a very useful and
instructive program.

Meteonorm
http://www.meteotest.ch/en/mn_home?w=ber
Meteonorm is just the ticket. You can download an evaluation version from
their site. They have an extensive database of weather for the whole globe
on an hourly basis. The download version only has 1 years data in it will
only allow you to export data to a text file for a limited number of cities,
Frankfurt, Tokyo, Accra (Ghana), Brazillia and somehwere else I forget. What
makes this program ideal for our purpose is that you can define an arbitary
inclined plane and get it to export the incident solar radiation levels hour
by hour for a whole year. Most excellent.

The model