In recent years there has been a lot of talk about solar and more renewable energy. In USA the recent IRA has provisions for extending solar and renewable energy, and the Florida governor last year supported Solar benefits which turn out to be helpful in many natural disasters, making an energy grid more easily self-sustainable after hurricanes that are common to that state. What if we could go over a map and see what buildings are the best candidates for solar generation? OpenStreetMap has not just street maps, but many other features, including building coordinates, which can give us polygons that can calculate areas for potential solar!
Continue reading “Where are the big roofs for Solar? A mathematical look at pulling data from OpenStreetMap”Plus codes as an easy location-sharing option
You may know of grid squares for general location in a ham radio contest, or the What3Words system with its easy access if you have network access, but there is another often-used location project you may not have heard of which is also easier than sharing a long latitude and longitude number!
Continue reading “Plus codes as an easy location-sharing option”Building a mobile app for Linux, part 4: GPS/mobile tracking
Another important part of many mobile apps is location tracking – there is, fortunately, there is a built in api for most Linux systems called Geoclue that should work… There is even a Python-geoclue package, but after some digging I found that this package does not work in Python3. In fact it’s hard to find examples or documentation, if you look at the files of the package you can see there are some basic docs:
Continue reading “Building a mobile app for Linux, part 4: GPS/mobile tracking”