Midspace's Experimental Solar Tracker [EOL]

End Of Life - not receiving any more updates.

This is an experimental cube and script used for tracking the position of the sun, to automatically reorient a Rotor to face the sun.

Basic instructions.

[olist] [*] Build your Rotor. [*] Build your Solar Panel onto the Rotor. [*] Build the SunSensor cube on the face of the Solar Panel. [*] Change the custom name of the SunSenor to include " /AT[Rotor 2] ", where the name of the rotor appeared between the []. [*] Watch the rotor turn to track the sun. [/olist]

You can have any name in the SunSenor, as long as the key "/AT[xxxx]" appears in it separated by a space. ie., "Sun Sensor 1 /AT[ROTOR 4]". or., "Sun Sensor 1 /AT(ROTOR 4)".

Manual tracking

If you wish to manually orient a Solar Panel, tracking information will appear in the "Show on Hud" settings. Simple edit the Solar Panel, and add "Az:0 El:0" ie., "Solar Panel 1 Az:0 El:0" The script will automatically update Az:0 and El:0 with the appropriate Azimuth and Elevation to rotate the Solar Panel.

Second Rotor

A second stage rotor can be enabled, but is very experimental, and I wouldn't try it on ships. Only Stations. ie., "Sun Sensor 1 /AT[Rotor 12][Rotor 13]". or., "Sun Sensor 1 /AT(Rotor 12)(Rotor 13)".

Caveats

It will track a moving sun. If you are using two rotors, be careful of how the rotors will flip the solar panel about. Rotor names are NOT case sensitive.

Rotor settings including torque, braking torque, and turn velocity will be reset by the Sun Sensor for its own purpose. Turn limits and displacement will not be touched.

The Sun Sensor purposely uses a Sensor as this will draw 1.98Kw of power. Once the solar array is reoriented, you can always turn the Sun Sensor off. (I may change/remove this in the future.)

The Solar Tracker block will obey ownership requirements. Please make sure you have set appropriate ownership to the Solar Track block and the associated Rotor blocks.

If you turn the Sun Sensor "Show On Hud", you may see a lot of debug information appear on screen. This script is still very experimental, please understand.

Issues

If it stops tracking the sun - or one of the two rotors you have configured stop turning. Edit the custom name of the SunSenor, and delete one of the brackets, and then add it back in. This should get it immediately working again. It doesn't move - Check the ownership of the sensor and rotors! It moves but does not line up properly. - Remove the Sun sensor and place a new one that is rotated by90 degrees (either left or right).

Dedicated Servers

This will work on a dedicated server. Rotors on multi player games can visually appear as if the rotor has gone crazy and flipping back and forth. This is only a visual desync between the client and server. The issue goes away when a player is seated in a chair on a connected grid to the rotor.