The Simpler Solar Calculator

Inspiration 🌟

I remember when my friend's parents were trying to go solar but didn’t proceed because they couldn’t estimate anything online. The tools were too complex. When they finally called a solar company, they realized it was out of their budget. I learned that checking what it might be like to go solar without calling a company is surprisingly complicated. Most solar tools are made by engineers, for engineers, so I wanted to create something simple that anyone could use to get started.

What it does 💭

The app takes basic user information and performs calculations to give rough estimates of system needs and costs. It’s not as precise as professional calculators, but it provides a simple starting point for anyone curious about going solar.

How we built it 👷‍♀️

I built it using Streamlit, which was the easiest way to get a working app quickly. The project was hosted on Streamlit Cloud with a fully interactive UI and a GitHub repo for version control.

Challenges we ran into 😣

The biggest challenge was coding the app from scratch! With limited experience in Python and no prior app development, I ran into multiple errors running Streamlit locally. Switching to the cloud version helped, though I initially ran into issues until I realized I needed a requirements.txt file. After that, it was smooth sailing as I learned more through research and practice

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🏆

I’m proud that I built a fully functioning app with zero prior experience. It may not be as advanced as other entries, but it’s my first step into hackathons and coding my own projects something I’ve always wanted to do!

What we learned 📝

I learned a lot about Python in the context of Streamlit, debugging, and carefully checking code when errors appeared. I also gained experience with variables, conditional statements, and more complex calculations while keeping track of data throughout the app.

What's next for The Simpler Solar Calculator ✨

I hope to improve this project in the future, not for another hackathon, but to see how far I’ve grown. I want it to serve as a foundation for future projects, and it was incredibly rewarding to learn and create something from scratch.

Built With

• python
• streamlit