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by EForEndeavour 1279 days ago
This sounds like an amazing project and learning opportunity! Reminds me of a halfbaked hardware+software project idea of my own:

- Goal: increase the amount of natural light in my apartment during the day

- Mount a flat mirror on a motorized sun-tracking attachment on south-facing balcony railing

- Set up geometry, software, and motor to rotate the mirror so that it always reflects a beam of sunlight into the apartment, trained on a target area between the wall and ceiling, above eye level of occupants

2 comments

Cool idea, there is a town in Austria where the sun doesn't shine in winter and they were going to build something like that on the adjacent mountaintop. I think it never happened, though.
An Italian town did build a mirror to do that.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epnvzn/viganella-italy-fake-...

[edit] Looks like a town in Norway did it as well, and theirs tracks the sun.

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/10/using-giant-mirror...

If you focus multiple mirrors on a single spot, you can set things on fire. Depending on one's application, this is a feature, not a bug!