The Home Stretch

We're just a few days away from our final presentation in the auditorium, which means it's crunch time. Our group is just about finished with our slideshow presentation, although thanks to Google being down today and not saving my slides, I have to redo four of them :( Oh well, que sera sera.
On a brighter note, Mr. Ono said that he'd be willing to let our group have some kalo to prepare for the parents/faculty/administrators that come to the symposium to show the (literal) fruits of our labor. We're still debating on whether we want to chance cooking kalo, as it probably wouldn't be that good to give admin people itchy throats. Mr. Kamalu also said that he has some small solar panels that he'd love for us to use in the auditorium lobby as a display for us, so if we decide to use it, we'll probably make a poster board to accompany it and give some brief information on the panel.
Other than that, all we have left to do is our final papers and peer evaluations. Oddly enough, the toughest decision we have to make by Friday is what color shirt we'll be wearing :P

Long Live

Wednesday afternoon, Tiare, Beau and I(Nicole) went down to Mr. Omo’s to meet Mr. Agena from Revolusun.  Mr. Kamalu met us down there as well.  On the agenda: allow solar panel to charge battery so it’s over the 12V charge.  The likely reason for our previous problem with the pump shutting off was due to the fact that batteries were not completely charged.

When we went down to Mr. Omo’s classroom we discovered our problems had only begun.  So much for thinking this project was going to be as simple as following a schematic and implementing our design…that would have been little to easy.  Instead rain water had to kill our Peak Power Point Tracker.  The panel for the tracker (which is wired to the solar panel, batteries and pump!) is located on the top of a storage container….which is susceptible to weather.  It just so happens that these past two weeks (the two weeks in which we are to implement our design) it has rained every day.  Along with death of our Peak Power Point Tracker, Mr. Kamalu, Mr. Agena and Mr. Omo found another problem concerning our wiring of the system.  I guess we had put the larger fuse where there was low current passing through, and a very small fuse where there was a flow of high current.  That’s probably why the system had shorted the previous day.

When all of our dreams of not failing this project had died, Mr. Agena sent this email.

LONG LIVE the Peak Power Point Tracker

Waterproofing

Yesterday after school, my dad, Alan and I went down to middle school to continue working on the solar panel and see if the water damage that had been done was reversible. The generator had dried along with the rest of our equipment, allowing us to hook everything up again and attempt to waterproof the wiring as much as possible in order to prevent it from further damage. This included replacing our wire nuts with waterproof wire nuts which contain a special gel that helps to insulate and protect the inner wires and covering the generator with a plastic bag in an attempt to keep water from getting in. I also had a chance to invite and speak to Alan to our presentation, resulting in him giving us Revolusun hats to wear for it. Mr. Omo also said that we could pick the kalo that’s growing in the grow bed to cook and serve as part of our presentation to show our class what we created by completing our project.

Final Pictures!

These are the final pictures of our project when we went down to middle school and implemented it. At first it only worked for about 10 seconds and then shut off. But the next day we got an email from Alan and he said the problem was that the batteries weren't up to 12V and wasn't charged enough. So that's why it didn't work. Today we're going to go down and fully finish the project completely by putting in the new tubing since the one we're using now is just a water hose. After we put in the new tubing, the project is pretty much done! Because all we need to do is charge the batteries using the solar panels and the sun, whenever it decides to show up. We are truly grateful of this opportunity that we have and that we were able to accomplish it despite all of our setbacks and problems. The Revolusun company saved us and our whole project because without them none of this would have been possible. So thank you to everyone that has helped us!

So close...

After all of the time and effort that our group put into getting our solar panel wired correctly, Mr. Kamalu brought to our attention that we had failed to make a hole in the box that we were using to house our wires for them to trail out of. So our first main endeavor today was to rewire everything and thread all of the wires into a tiny hole in the box. Once we completed that, we took the solar panel and PPPT down to middle school to implement our design and test it out.
When we got down to middle school, it was simply a matter of wiring the solar panel to the PPPT, and then the PPPT to the batteries. We acheived this without much of a struggle, but things can never happen without a hitch.
The second problem that we encountered was that the tubing that we had to attach to the pump was too tiny. The pump requires a 3/4" inner diameter tubing, but we had a 3/4" outer diameter tubing, a simple mistake that anyone could have made. We temporarily used a spare water hose that Mr. Omo had hanging around to hook up to the pump. The fit was a bit iffy, but when Nicole flipped the switch, the pump worked and we had a flow of water running from the fishpond to the grow bed above!
This didn't last for long though. The water stopped flowing after about 10-15 seconds, which was really disappointing. Alan used his super, handy-dandy multimeter (our favoritest things ever) and noticed that we had a lack of energy from the switch and the PPPT. This was really odd to all of us because the system worked for a bit, and then stopped. Hopefully we're able to get this problem fixed soon, but in the mean time, the water pump is able to run off of the power that is stored in the batteries for about two days, and on sunny days, the solar panel will bring in enough power to keep the pump running.
The theme for our group today? Never ever give up! Even though we faced some serious highs and lows today, Nicole's bracelet kept us positive and we know that we'll be able to come out of this project successful.

image: http://www.joyjars.org/jj/wp-content/uploads/pic-negu-bracelet.jpg

P.S. I know we're supposed to have our own multi-media, but my internet is taking FOREVER to upload the video that I intended on using for this posting, so hopefully I can get it up sometime tomorrow :)

Next Steps

As we had prom this weekend and we all had a good time, its time now to get back to work. We are on that final stretch of things to complete for our project. Thanks to Tiare and her dad, we were able to troubleshoot all of our final problems and now we hope to take it down to middle school either tomorrow or tuesday to implement the final project with everyone there. We are extremely grateful for everyones support and especially for Alan and Revolusun for making all of these things even possible. We never thought that something so small as an idea could explode into something as big as this, and we're glad we took the opportunity to partake in this project. We must now double check everything to make sure it's all correct and then take it down to middle school and set it up! The only problem we have now is to find a good spot on where to put the solar panels since we can't put it on the roof of the building and on the sidewalk where all of the middle schoolers walk. Any suggestions?

Planning the Installation

Since Tiare and her Dad worked so diligently (ps. thank you so much!) and finished up the wiring, our next goal is to install the system by Wednesday.  Either Monday and/or Tuesday after school we are planning to go down to Mr. Omo's to install everything.  A pretty crucial detail that we are still debating is where we are going to place the solar panel.  In order to get the maximum amount of sunlight to convert to energy the panel needs to be at a 20 degree tilt.  There are very few places at Mr. Omo's classroom where we could place the solar panel.  We could place it on crates on the grass.  There will be shade created due to the power lines.  There is also the possibility of putting it on the roof, which would be close to a 20 degree tilt.  Unfortunately this would have to wait until summer for the school electricians to complete.  Our best bet is to put the panel on the grass and risk the shade.

Old Solar Panel