Space Engineers

Space Engineers

Not enough ratings
Smart Solar Panels
   
Award
Favorite
Favorited
Unfavorite
File Size
Posted
2.011 KB
17 Nov, 2015 @ 4:04am
1 Change Note ( view )

Subscribe to download
Smart Solar Panels

Description
================
Smart Solar Panels
================

A simple script which will turn your solar panel array to face the sun and output the details to a 1x1 LCD screen. This is intended for a stationary, planet-side setup and uses only one rotor. Fully automatic; minimal setup and no maintenance necessary. (NB Single player only! DetailedInfo has some... issues on DS at the moment).

Currently, solar panel output priority is still bugged, so to combat this I have included a temporary workaround. If you type "Override ON" into the argument field, the script will also turn off all refineries, arc furnices, and assemblers during the day (while the solar panels are active). This is a temporary inclusion until Keen work out the kinks with power priorities.



Required blocks:
- Rotor with attached solar panels
- 1x1 LCD screen
- Programmable block
- Timer block

1. Build your stationary solar array tower, ensuring that 0° is pointing directly up and the rotation of the rotor is aligned with path of the sun.
2. Enter the name of your rotor and LCD screen into the script, along with the angle that sunrise occurs at from the point of view of your rotor.
3. If desired, type "Override ON" into the argument field to enable production block management.

** Upon starting, if the rotar is too far out of alignment it will face its back towards the sun and lock up at 180°. Wait until night, the rotar will return to its standby position, and everything will work the next day and thereon out. **



Future updates:
- Support for multiple solar array towers
- Error handling
- More LCD data (and ASCII animations, of course)

Found a bug? Please leave a description in the comments below. Otherwise, if you've got any ideas or requests, leave those too and I'll see what I can do about working them into a future update =] Thanks!
27 Comments
Wowy 19 Nov, 2016 @ 5:03am 
i doesnt work for me :/
Schventagon 15 Feb, 2016 @ 1:02pm 
Hey Bilky, I've had trouble gettin gyour script to work. I'm running it with the Powerfix mod and the Freya Battery Management script. I have the rotor that "rolls" my panel sheet named "Rotor Solar" and the screen it's supposed to display on as "LCD Power" with my sunrise angle set at 70 degrees. The code checks out...am I missing a step?
sybersmoke 5 Dec, 2015 @ 7:01pm 
Any plans to adapt your system to allow a T design? So a left and right side rotor?
Damadark 4 Dec, 2015 @ 8:41am 
Nilky thank you for the script. been having not so much fun to maintain power since I am on a very hard start so slowly building up on solar panels. I have 1 issue however. My rotor is reversed so I need it to go 0 to -180. where can I change it so it tilts the right direction? Is it in the code line rotor.SetValueFloat("UpperLimit", 179.9f);. plus you mention to set the direction of the rotor tilt but I can't locate that.
Digital_Samurai 4 Dec, 2015 @ 6:56am 
Can I share my world to you so you can take a look at my setup? I think I did something wrong and have checked several times for it but keep missing it. (I do that a lot) sometimes it helps to have a second pair of eyes on it.
Golden Dragon 23 Nov, 2015 @ 11:45am 
This work on DS?
August_Grimm 22 Nov, 2015 @ 1:06pm 
I don't mess around with timer blocks ore scripts, could you provide more in-depth detail on how to set the timer block up?
Bilky  [author] 20 Nov, 2015 @ 1:38pm 
@Commander Shepard - just loaded it into a test world and it ran without any hiccups. Love the design dude, looks great! Those exception errors occur when the script is trying to access something that doesn't exist. It usually occurs when you've renamed a block to something different to what you've called it in the script... I'm gonna make a wild guess and say you may have renamed the rotor/lcd to match your naming convention and didn't match it up with the first page of the script maybe? =P
aaronlukemarshall 20 Nov, 2015 @ 9:43am 
When i load the game i run into an excpetion on the script, do you find this too?