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A drone can lift itself only through the power of a solar panel
(thelemmy.club)
Some amazing engineer built a drone that can lift its own weight using only the electric power that it gets from an on-board solar panel and nothing else (no battery).
Video: I Built a Solar Powered Drone and it WORKS by Luke Maximo Bell
Uh no. This thing is really fragile and at the limit of what's technologically feasible. It won't survive in any real world application.
Yet.
Sure. Technology moves on. This sort of thing may well be commonplace in a few years.
yeah it's really really fragile. they show it in the video, one of the panels broke because a cat stepped on it. obviously not very suited for real-world deployment.
however i do wonder why they use polycrystalline silicon and not just amorphous silicon? I mean 20% efficiency instead of 8% makes a difference but i did some rough maths and it could still work with amorphous silicon if you use the area on the drone better. But amorphous silicon has the advantage of making a very thin and flexible layer that doesn't break easily. It's essentially more like a flexible piece of cloth instead of a solid object. Maybe worth a consideration.
It's still fun to think about this stuff, maybe just maybe it will be feasible in far future.