EEVblog #632 - Solar Roadways Are BULLSHIT!

[Fungus]

The rogue LED's back again, needs some more maintenance. Is anybody in the area?

[jonovid]

is it a little odd when some people spend a lot of time monitoring the entrance to public toilets 

[Brumby]

We just got our first frost this week. We have a warm front for the next few days. Then .... the City of Sandpoint will have to start putting a barricade around their ice-covered, electric disco floor, lest someone going to the loo take a header and break something.

That would be somewhat of a major fail, wouldn't it?

[vk6zgo]

We just got our first frost this week. We have a warm front for the next few days. Then .... the City of Sandpoint will have to start putting a barricade around their ice-covered, electric disco floor, lest someone going to the loo take a header and break something.

That would be somewhat of a major fail, wouldn't it?

It reminds me a bit of the architect who designed a building here in Perth with beautiful smooth,shiny tiles surrounding it.
Lovely in the Summer,but the first rains turned it into a skating rink!

[EEVblog]

He seems to be right about the LED's not being set to full brightness, just look at this stuck LED:


But given that the LED's are the only thing working on this entire project, why deliberately set them to low brightness? 
They obviously have some issue preventing full brightness being used.

[ataradov]

They obviously have some issue preventing full brightness being used.

It may be overwhelmingly bright when its dark outside. I don't know if they have light sensors. You would thing they have, but then again, you would also think they should give up.

It looks like they are starting to have some weather up there, lets see how water proof those things are.

[amspire]

He seems to be right about the LED's not being set to full brightness, just look at this stuck LED:

Trouble is it is a very overcast day.

I was driving west the other day in the evening into a very bright low sun and I was having great difficulty seeing freshly painted lane markings due to the way the light was reflecting off the road at times. LEDS would have to be exceptionally bright to be visible, and if they were that bright, they would be far to bright for anyone not driving straight into the sun.

The traditional painted lanes do some really cool things - they change brightness automatically with the applied light. They do not disappear or go crazy when there is a computer fault or a power failure. You can add various sorts of rumble strip solutions so you can hear and feel when you are drifting out of a lane or off the road.

Imagine if you have a big complex high speed multi-lane interconnect with LED lane markers and all of a sudden the road markings go crazy due to a computer glitch in peak hour.

[Fungus]

Imagine if you have a big complex high speed multi-lane interconnect with LED lane markers and all of a sudden the road markings go crazy do to a computer glitch in peak hour.

What are the odds of that, given this guy's engineering track record?

[TinamousSteve]

Imagine if you have a big complex high speed multi-lane interconnect with LED lane markers and all of a sudden the road markings go crazy do to a computer glitch in peak hour.

What are the odds of that, given this guy's engineering track record?

I don't think we need worry about that, nobody's going to be able to see them...

[Habropoda]

Imagine if you have a big complex high speed multi-lane interconnect with LED lane markers and all of a sudden the road markings go crazy due to a computer glitch in peak hour.

Gives new meaning to the Blue Screen of Death.

[jonovid]

Imagine if you have a big complex high speed multi-lane interconnect with LED lane markers and all of a sudden the road markings go crazy due to a computer glitch in peak hour.

Just Imagine if your a council road maintenance worker. But with Solar Roadways, now you must be  a qualified electronics technician, or your out of a Job!

[Brumby]

Imagine if you have a big complex high speed multi-lane interconnect with LED lane markers and all of a sudden the road markings go crazy due to a computer glitch in peak hour.

Just Imagine if your a council road maintenance worker. But with Solar Roadways, now you must be  a qualified electronics technician, or your out of a Job!

No, no, no.... It's a job creation exercise!

The road maintenance worker will still have his job - but there will be two other jobs created.

The first is the Electronics Technician (as you have said) who's job will be to isolate the tiles so they are safe to wrangle....
Then you will have the Structural Technician that will ensure the tiles and their mountings are removed safely....
Then the road maintenance worker can fill in the hole.
Once that job is done, then the Structural technician can be called back to refit the mountings and tiles, followed by the Electronics Technician who will reconnect, test and recommission the system.

Hey presto, 3 jobs instead of one!

[TinamousSteve]

I got to thinking how sad it was we had have no data from any panels, nothing on solar energy capture, or heating, or full brightness LEDs in daylight.

Then I wondered about making a mock-up of one, just out of acrylic and stuff. It's not like it could be much worse than the Sandpoint installation. I'd also had a beer so my judgement may have been a little blury....

And then this happened... http://www.SolarFlippinGardens.com



Please feel free to:

• join the project - it's just for fun, all open source, maybe we can learn something from it, or make something useful (not of the solar panel variety)
  
• or mock all you like,
• or spread amazing stories of how good these Solar Flippin' Gardens panels are going to be 
• tell me not to waste my time and money

Sorry, no $50 T-Shirts available, no crowd funding, no real end product. Just some silly fun.

[EEVblog]

The traditional painted lanes do some really cool things - they change brightness automatically with the applied light. They do not disappear or go crazy when there is a computer fault or a power failure. You can add various sorts of rumble strip solutions so you can hear and feel when you are drifting out of a lane or off the road.

Yet you try and point out these benefits to the solar roadways fanboys and they just keep crapping on about how the LED's can work

[EEVblog]

Imagine if you have a big complex high speed multi-lane interconnect with LED lane markers and all of a sudden the road markings go crazy due to a computer glitch in peak hour.

Every other issue aside, the road authorities would not approve a purely LED based solution on the basis of this. These agencies are arse covering by default.

[bktemp]

He seems to be right about the LED's not being set to full brightness, just look at this stuck LED:

Maybe the multiplexing failed and the one led is now driven at a much too high current?

Are there too many people watching the live feed? I get a blank page with the following message:

Oops, the page you are looking for may have been removed, renamed, entered wrong or is temporarily unavailable!

[TinamousSteve]

Just consider the surface. Either the original studded one or this new smoother one with edge join cover strips screwed down. No-one will tolerate the vibration that will result or the tire noise generated. Right from the start that alone suggested to me this was never going to be an actual road surface.

It may have some niche use in car-parks or shopping centers or remote tourist locations where vehicle volumes and speeds are not very high.

Just for your amusement here is an example of my local council and their environmental awareness. Outside the entrance to my local library they have installed a solar powered rubbish bin (trashcan for our American friends). It just goes to show how this sort of thing is universal. The actual bin is not the main problem, it is that they installed it on the shaded side of a covered walkway, under a tree, next to a wall that will shade it after about 1 pm. I took these photos shortly before noon just as the sun fell on it for the first time in the day. And the sloping solar panel on the top faces the wall.

I should have included a photo of the solar panel on the top of the parking ticket machine in the underground carpark at my local supermarket.

That's what you call a rubbish location 

[Fungus]

Outside the entrance to my local library they have installed a solar powered rubbish bin (trashcan for our American friends). It just goes to show how this sort of thing is universal. The actual bin is not the main problem, it is that they installed it on the shaded side of a covered walkway, under a tree

What exactly is is supposed to be powering?  Are there any lights on it or cables coming out the bottom?

I should have included a photo of the solar panel on the top of the parking ticket machine in the underground carpark at my local supermarket.

I bet they're rainproof, too.

It's understandable that manufacturers make one universal machine to be used both indoors and outdoors. The savings in paperwork and ordering/installation mistakes will probably pay for a few useless solar panels.

[Fungus]

I don't know what all the fuss is about.

Solar roadways will really become relevant when we all switch over to flying cars.

[TinamousSteve]

Outside the entrance to my local library they have installed a solar powered rubbish bin (trashcan for our American friends). It just goes to show how this sort of thing is universal. The actual bin is not the main problem, it is that they installed it on the shaded side of a covered walkway, under a tree

What exactly is is supposed to be powering?  Are there any lights on it or cables coming out the bottom?

I should have included a photo of the solar panel on the top of the parking ticket machine in the underground carpark at my local supermarket.

I bet they're rainproof, too.

It's understandable that manufacturers make one universal machine to be used both indoors and outdoors. The savings in paperwork and ordering/installation mistakes will probably pay for a few useless solar panels.

My guess would be that it has internet connectivity to notify the appropriate people if it needs emptying, it probably only needs to signal when it gets to a predefined level, or maybe occasional updates to indicate it's alive and the approximate level, the panel with a few hours of light on it is probably more than enough to power a small micro for a daily update with occasional sensing (although I've not done any beer mat calculations!).

You save money by not emptying it when it doesn't need to be emptied, and save annoyance by emptying more frequently if required. I guess branding wise a Solar bin is more friendly than a snoopy internet connected one.

[cowana]

I've seen a few solar bins around where I live. They're an interesting idea - they have a built in electric trash compactor, so they have a much greater capacity to be emptied much less often. Then they also have sensors to determine when they *do* need emptying, so save the cost of routinely emptying every day whether they need it or not.

Actually pretty smart - and given the solar panel just has to trickle charge a battery (for the compacting motor and GSM modem which fires up occasionally), I'd expect them to work fine in even very shady areas.

Not a bad idea actually - unlike roadways!

[PA0PBZ]

What exactly is is supposed to be powering?  Are there any lights on it or cables coming out the bottom?

[johndoe123]

Don't forget that many vehicles including heavy haulage trucks require chains to be fitted in icy conditions, have they even bothered to test the effect these have on panels that may become brittle when the temperature drops ?.

After all these years they haven't even driven a regular car over them. Only thing they have driven on them is a <1 ton tractor with huge weight distributing wheels.


And where is the solar output data from that big test system? 

at least they used green solder mask....well actually it would make sense to use white solder mask in this application.

[Fungus]

What exactly is is supposed to be powering?  Are there any lights on it or cables coming out the bottom?

That's pretty cool!

If it's well designed and only compacts once a day then even a small amount of light might be enough. You could just gradually charge up a big supercapacitor or something, then... squish!

[StuUK]

So just played catchup on this story and watched a view vids, read a couple of articles and now feel physically sick. The biggest load of BS I've seen for sometime, its one thing when people throw a couple of bucks/pounds whatever at a BS kickstarter but it's another thing when government gives large sums of money with zero diligence. Fuckwits!