Monday, September 28, 2009

Demonstrable Geekiness

While I'm nowhere near "professional grade" at programming, I have managed to finish my little learning-to-program-in-Java project.

It's a simple, basic little utility to let someone interested in building a small (home/cabin) solar panel (Photo-Voltaic) to generate and store some amount of electricity.

The program lets the user enter and adjust a variety of different loads (a fridge, TV, etc), how many of what sizes of solar panels and batteries, power inverters for those things that NEED regular "line" power, and a few other little helpful options. As the different user-input values change, the program recalculates everything. The user has the option to either print the information to a printer, or save it to a computer file that can be imported to a spreadsheet (where they can get serious about playing with the numbers, if they want). The program is called PVcalc, and is available for download from my website.

If you're interested, curious, or just like to watch trainwrecks, go on over and get yourself a copy and let me know how bad I suck at programming :-)