This joke is brought to you by the old people who’s knees hurt

People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms

Not simply operating at a loss, absolutely dumping their prices giving away their products for almost nothing to gain market share. They are burning money at an impressive rate, just for some imaginary payoff in the future.

PORNHUB

It’s Pornhub, like https://pornhub.com/. One of the biggest (if not the biggest) porn site on the planet, used by millions if not billions. There is nothing wrong with watching porn if you feel like it. What you do in your own home is your own business. Just don’t wank too much, or you are going to have health issues. Which are also totally normal and you should just go talk to your doctor, they will not be surprised or shocked, it is literally their job to deal with stuff like that.

I feel the world is going crazy. Shoving all of this stuff under the carpet isn’t helping anyone and won’t make it go away. Half of the time I can’t understand my young niece and nephew because they speak in this code language, evolving all the time so they can talk about normal stuff young people talk about and stay ahead of the big censor machine. And often it’s censored so poorly, everyone can still read it, like what was the point then?

Sure just saying, not trolling at all.

Solar drives energy prices down, not up. In the summer the energy price regularly goes negative because there is so much solar available.

And it isn’t even remotely true, other countries have higher energy prices than Germany within the EU. The Netherlands for example has crazy high energy prices. And that’s in absolute numbers, not even corrected for things like GDP.

“Aber im Winter sind meine Räder quadratisch”, sagt der Zug

Hollow Knight

But depending how you feel about bugs it might not be as much cute as it might be nightmare fuel

All of the Kirby games are really fun for kids, especially the 2D ones. I recommend Kirby Star Allies, I played it a lot with my nephew when he was 5

I know you don’t want to hear it, but forget about the solar panels my man. It’s not going to work and it isn’t going to be worth it. You can charge the battery from the grid a thousand times for the cost of the solar panel. And that’s excluding all the other extra components you’d need to include if you want solar charging. Plus all of the time you have to put into it.

But if you just want to do it for shits and giggles, just go look up a panel that fits your size and other specs. The watt peak is right there in the specs.

Alright, now we get to the real question, that’s something we can help with.

How big is this robot going to be? Because to tell you the truth: solar panels kind of suck. If the angle isn’t perfect and you don’t have a lot of square meter, the output is terrible. That means putting them on mobile things is kind of hard. There usually isn’t a lot of surface area available and almost always the angle to the sun is going to be terrible. And keep in mind they don’t work in the shade. So inside won’t work, in between buildings won’t work, under some trees won’t work, a bit of clouds and it won’t work etc. So you need a big ass battery onboard to buffer energy, so the robot can charge up in the sun and then run on battery power the rest of the time. Then we get to weight, those regular 400Wp panels you were calculating with are regular roof panels. Those have a aluminum frame, plastic back and glass front. They are around 120x180 cm and pretty heavy. They are also sturdy but can break easily since they are made of glass. For mobile applications you need to look at RV panels. Those are usually flexible, rugged and much lighter. The spec you are looking for is Watt peak. That gives you the amount of watt the panel produces in perfect conditions. You can then calculate the losses you get in your situation because it won’t be perfect. The batteries used in combination with solar are normally lithium iron phosphate. These can store huge amounts of energy and are very safe. Plus they last a long time and can do a lot of cycles. However they are very heavy and to get enough energy storage you need a big ass battery. They are also very expensive. For robots you are probably going to want lithium ion instead. These are cheaper, lighter and can still store a lot of energy. However they are very dangerous to work with and wear out faster. In a mobile application to prevent losses you also don’t want an inverter that converts stuff from DC coming from the panels to AC. It’s a lot better to stay at DC all the time, for example 24V. That way conversion losses are kept to a minimum. But you’d still want a good inverter with builtin battery charger, as the voltage coming out of solar panels fluctuates a lot. Just connecting them directly to batteries is a really bad idea. Solar panels also don’t like it if you draw as much current as possible, that ruins their efficiency. Because of how they work, there is a sweet spot in the voltage and current. Be sure to get an inverter that takes this into account (keyword mppt).

Take a look at something like this panel:

https://www.amazon.com/Flexible-Monocrystalline-Semi-Flexible-Trailer-Surfaces/dp/B0BQ1Y8JMH

If you get three of these you can get something going. If you do it right you can get about 100W of energy under perfect sunny conditions with 3 of these panels combined. That isn’t a lot of energy.

That’s why you don’t really see solar panels on anything mobile, it really kinda sucks. My advice for solar power robots: put a solar installation on the roof, put all of the energy generated over a year into the grid and simply charge the batteries for the robot from the grid. This way you can’t just charge when there is sun and if there is sun and you don’t need to charge the energy isn’t wasted. And being on the roof they are sure to be at a better angle and without any obstructions. They can also be as big as the roof, which helps a lot. This is what we do with electric cars and it seems to be the most efficient we can get.

You aren’t posting correct information, you are making assumptions that are unwarranted and therefor claim stuff that simply isn’t true. Most things aren’t true or false in an absolute way when it comes to complex systems, they are only true under specific conditions or when taking into account certain assumptions. Often it’s easy to generalize and handwave away small details, because they don’t matter for the end result we are going for. But you then can’t say this is a fact and works in all cases, sometimes the details matter a lot.

When it comes to solar installations, those are very complex things. That’s why you only find the resources you found, they are meant to convey a specific understanding of a complex system as it applies to the general audience. For example how many panels should I get, or how much money will I save on my energy bill if I get solar. If you go into the nitty gritty of solar installations it gets complex super fast and small details can matter a whole lot.

For example I have a micro-inverter system where each inverter doesn’t take full advantage of the capabilities of my panels. However due to my location and the angle of my panels, the panels don’t reach that peak capability for almost all of the year. Maybe in perfect conditions on a couple of days a year in the middle of the day, I go over the peak. I could change the angle, but that means more ballast is required for the bigger wind profile, which means I need a structural calculation done which costs money. So I opted to go for cheaper inverters, saving something like $300 on the whole installation, but that means I miss out on about $100 over the lifetime of the system in generated energy. Since that’s a nett positive of $200, that’s what I went with. I could have optimized a bit more to make use of the low-end of the solar output better if I went with a single inverter system instead of the micro-inverters, but that means a large device in a place that was inconvenient and the pricing calculation was tight.

The reason you aren’t getting a straight answer is because it appears to be a XY problem situation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem). You are asking for something that doesn’t really make a lot of sense to ask. So it’s likely you are actually trying to figure out something else, have come to the conclusion this is the information you need and thus asked the question. However that conclusion probably wasn’t correct, as the question doesn’t make sense. So it would be really helpful if you ask the initial question you are trying to figure out and let people help with that instead.

When talking solar it would also really help if you state where about you are located on the planet and if you feel like sharing which country, as each country has very different ways of structuring the pricing of energy and that matters a lot when it comes to solar.

Check out this: https://globalsolaratlas.info/map

Be sure to check out the details, it has the exact specs for your location.

I did a calculation for a 20kWh battery for my installation, which would cost me about 18k to purchase and setup. I can do a lot of the work myself, so the equipment costs are the bulk of the price. Figuring a prediction in the price of energy, my usage pattern and a lifetime of 15 years for the batteries, it figured out to be not worth it.

In winter where I live I’m totally fucked, there is basically no sun at all and it’s cold AF so energy usage is highest. Any battery would be empty within days and not really able to charge it because the little bit of solar that might be available is used right away in heating. So it would be down to spring and fall where there is still some sun and also some request for energy.

You can’t convert the kWh to W, that’s not how it works. The amount of sunlight is highly variable during the day and the way the sunslight gets converted into usable energy differs a lot depending on the installation.

Normally those calculators assume you can connect the solar installation to the grid and use the grid as a buffer. So when there is sun and you’re not using it, you deliver the power back to the grid. And when there is no sun, you get your power from the grid. When there is a little sun, or you’re using a lot, you use some energy from the solar panels and some from the grid.

It starts getting complicated depending on how your local grid works. Often supplying back energy to the grid means the power provider credits you a certain amount. Depending on your contract, this might be a day price or even hourly. Or it may be a fixed price. This often means you pay a lot more using power from the grid then you get back pushing power back into the grid. So you need to think more in terms of money and using the energy in a way that’s cheapest.

If you are thinking about an off grid installation, the amount of power is almost always dependent on your equipment and not so much the solar panels. For example you can charge up a large bank of batteries from the sun during say a week. Then when fully charged, you can draw huge amounts of power from them till the bank is empty. But depending on the batteries used and the inverter used to convert DC into AC, the amount of amps it can push can be limited.

When thinking of something simple like a use case where you directly use the DC from the solar panel, the panel specs always include the Wp value. You can use that to calculate the exact amount depending on your location, time of day and angle of the panel. Weather services these days also include a watt per square meter of solar energy for different locations, which is useful. And keep in mind it only works when it’s sunny, with clouds the output drops a lot.

I’ve seen huge swings in my pv installation year on year. So it isn’t a sure thing how much energy you get from the sun.

All well and good as long as it’s something they own themselves. I’ve rather grown to hate all the public anti-vax, racist and far right stickers the idiots share on Telegram and plaster all over public property. Even in the nature reserve I like to walk to relax some dick has put Nazi stickers on every post in sight as well as all over informational signs telling people about the unique wildlife. It makes my blood boil, which is the opposite of relaxing in the forest.

Humans are pretty complex so what may seem like a self contradiction actually isn’t in fact.

But I can hit you with another one for me personally: I fucking love a big juicy burger, especially with cheese, pineapple, lettuce and spicy sauce. However I am normally a vegetarian and try to restrict my meat consumption as much as reasonably possible. I’m not a full vegan, because that just seems like self torture without a lot of extra gains, but maybe I’ll become one in the future.

And I can write you essays upon essays about how much I hate Windows and other Microsoft software. Even though it has a special place in my heart, because when I got my first computer in 1984, it ran Microsoft BASIC as its primary “OS”.

I’ve been using Linux on my personal desktop system since 1997 and I think it’s great. However as a user I fucking hate Linux so much. It is so frustrating to use, it always breaks in weird ways.

It can do anything because you can configure so much and you can even go into the code and make thing your own. But at the same time it can’t do anything, there usually isn’t a basic framework to do what most people want. Each user is just supposed to figure it out for themselves and put their system together in a way that makes sense. Even someone like me who can understand all this crap and can read, understand and contribute to the code, doesn’t always want to do this. And most users wouldn’t be able to do it anyways. Let me just spend 12 hours of my own free time to figure out something that isn’t documented very well, with often wrong or outdated information, weird bugs with quirks and workaround and fun interactions with other bugs and workarounds I have on my system.

Just the other day I raged my head off because some kind of update broke my shit. There is this protocol that allows for the OS to tell monitors what brightness they need to be on. This is awesome for tablet/convertibles/laptops/all-in-ones, but for desktop systems I don’t really see the use case. But it can’t hurt the feature is there and you choose not to use it right? However it turned out this latest update had a nasty bug in it. At boot it somehow set all my monitors to 100% brightness, which was highly unpleasant and kept resetting it to 100% every boot. Not only that, it turned out my main monitor had too much clever for its own good. It has two modes of operating, one mode where the builtin OS inside the monitor does everything, it handles all the settings, profiles, color shit, protocols etc. The other way of operating is where the OS inside the computer does everything, they have a driver for Windows and some neat software that allows you to do everything in there. It has game recognition software and tweaks the monitor to work perfectly with that game etc. However me being a Linux user, they ofcourse don’t have any of that, not even a driver etc. but I know this when I selected the monitor so I made sure it could handle everything inside the monitor as well, so I could use it to it’s full potential on Linux. But this update broke all of that, because the monitor saw the OS was telling it to go to a certain brightness setting, so it assumed the OS inside the computer would be running the show and reverted back to some default safe profile until the software utility could tell it what to do. This made my monitor borderline unusable and flash bang me every reboot (which was a lot of times whilst I was trying to figure out how to fix it).

I put in a lot of hours and was able to somewhat consistently block the brightness control so the monitor could again be in charge. But not after the monitor was fed up with all my shit and just completely doing a factory reset, so I lost the personal profile I had been tweaking for years.

Now I know the monitor probably shouldn’t work this way and it’s bullshit the manufacturer doesn’t create Linux drivers and makes sure the software utility is available on Linux. But on the other hand, this is just the way the world is. Blaming it on some huge corporation that doesn’t give a shit and runs on cost/benefit calculations doesn’t fix my monitor. In my experience this is a huge problem in the Linux community (me included), we tend to get mad at other entities that cause the problem as an excuse for not fixing said problem. Which is perfectly valid from a person point of view, but very frustrating from a user point of view.

Most people who went through what I went through with my monitor wouldn’t be able to fix it and simply give up on using Linux forever. Or at least till they get a new monitor 5-10 years down the line.

Source: I made it the fuck up

He is the Messiah!

Well you’d want your anti-corruption minister to be very familiar with corruption, so she can battle it effectively. Know your enemy kind of thing.