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Solar Max Power

2017-11-17 Update: No longer needs a timer block. If you had one before, I recommend you "disconnect" it from the prog block (remove all its actions) to reduce surprises.

(Also see my Solar Alignment for Fixed Solar Panels script if you'd rather avoid using rotors. It supports multi-axes and is just as easy to set up.)

Yet another rotor controller script for solar panels.

This was more of an exercise for me (really, my first C# script).

I created this script to address some issues I found in the few others I tried, namely:

• Simplification of configuration. I would rather deal with groups rather than have to name each part something specific.
  
• Other scripts never seem to stabilize.

Initial set up is fairly standard:

1. Load into programmable block
   
2. Create groups containing exactly 1 rotor (advanced or standard) along with any/all solar panels attached to that rotor. The name of groups must start with "SolarMaxPower", so you can use "SolarMaxPower1" or "SolarMaxPower Foo" or whatever.

The rotors should have max torque and the limits should make sense for your ship (so the panels don't hit things). Set the velocity to +/- 0.1 or 0.2. But you can experiment with this.

Inside the script, you can customize the group prefix that it looks for.

It definitely only works with a single axis, since I specifically filter out rotors that aren't on the same grid as the programmable block. (This is because I use this script with drones which dock a lot...)


If you run the prog block with certain arguments, you can pause and resume the script. You'd typically set these up on a cockpit or remote toolbar.

• pause -- This pauses the script.
  
• resume -- This resumes the script.

Note that the state of the script is saved between reloads. You can view the current state of the script by opening the terminal and selecting the script's prog block. It will tell you whether it is paused or display the current power reading from all managed solar panels.