PROTEAS: Solar Research Facility

Proteas is a solar facility locate in Pentakomo, in the southern part of the island of Cyprus. The facility launched on 3rd October 2015 and it is currently used for scientific purposes. Some days ago we were lucky to attend a tour from the Cyprus institute researchers on the facility and have a close look at the installation. I include some photos from our visit.

The facility is actually a Concentrated Solar Power and thermal De-Salination of Sea Water. Mirrors reflect the solar rays to a specific point in the tower. It is designed to use molten salt, although it is still not operational. You can find more information regarding The Cyprus Institute and Proteras here.

Reflecting mirrors at the Proteras solar facility in Cyprus.

Solar tower of the Proteras solar facility in Cyprus. The white block at the top is used for calibrating and measurements, as it contains multiple temperature sensors. Due to a small accident last week, more than one array was concentrated in the area, making it burn. Not operating at the moment we took the picture.

The control room of the Proteas Solar facility in Cyprus. You have full control of the mirrors, operation of the machines, and multiple cameras for checking the situation outside.

Pump of molten salt in the Proteas solar facility in Cyprus.

Concentration area of solar rays in the Proteas solar facility in Cyprus.

Concentration area without the protective lid of solar rays in the Proteas solar facility in Cyprus.

Sensors of the facility in the Proteas solar facility in Cyprus.

De-Salination machine in the Proteas solar facility in Cyprus. Not active when we visit the facility. Can produce some 10s liters per day, ideal for using it for cleaning the reflecting mirrors.

View of the beach, back side of the Protes Solar facility/

Processing Milky Way in RawTherapee

This text is an analysis of a video I did some months ago how to process photos of our Milky Way in RawTherapee. You can find the picture here . The photo was taken by wiegemalt. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Editing: Step 1: Fixing lighting The first thing someone notices when opening the picture is the extreme noise due to high ISO used (1600 - check the picture on the right). The first thought is to de-noise the picture, however, if you do that you are going to loose the details of the night sky. The main reason for the high noise is the additional exposure Rawtherapee adds when the 'Auto' button is pressed. In particular, the RT adds +2.4 EV to equalize the picture. This is Wrong! What we want is to keep the noise down and at the same time bring the stars up. That's why we are going to play with the Tone Curve of the RT. To adjust the light properly we increase the cont

Static linking with gcc and g++

In this tutorial, we will explain what the static linking is, how this affect the size of final binary, and why statically linking with g++ sometimes is pain. By definition, a statically compiled binary is a group of programmer ‘s routines, external functions, and variables which are packed into the final binary executable. The compiler or the linker produces the final object and embeds all the functions and variables and the linking phase. There are two reasons of using dynamic linking and shared libraries: 1) Avoid creating a huge binary, if all the programs use a standard set of libraries why not having the operating system providing to them 2) Compatibility on operating system and machine dependant characteristics: sometimes the libraries must be implemented based on the architecture or the operating system and using dynamic linking is an easy way to avoid this catch. On the other hand, static linking is the ideal way of distributing one software product, paying

Homemade NAS after two and half years

Few years ago, I created a NAS system using my old PC. The old pc is powerful enough to do the basic NAS operation except real time transcoding of 4K or more than one 1080 streams. The setup was setup as follows: 1 SSD 128 GB for boot device 2x 4 TBs for the main storage configured as RAID 1 The hard disks were from different manufacturers (WD red plus and Segate) to avoid catastrophic situations: disks are part of a bad batch and you will have a second failed disk during the build of the RAID array. Here is a list of my mistakes: My first mistake was CentOS. I wanted a stable machine without surprises, unexpected behavior, as much less bugs affecting my setup. I had three free/open source options: Open Media Vault: Debian based Linux with many configuration options. The main downside is that you don't have support for ZFS and you have to very often use the command line to fix things. Moreover, there are a plethora of open issues/bugs that can make your life harder than expected

Personal Blog

Search This Blog