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Aptera has this planned but not sure if they ever reach market maturity.
There also was a project car from the Nordics I think. Can't recall the name though.
Main problem is the large amount of energy a car needs vs what kind of surface area you have and efficiency we get.
An ideal (100% effiwncy) solar cell of 5m² would still need 20 hours to charge a 100kWh battery. And we are way off on area an efficiency in reality.
I think this "* The software is pretty specific to my requirements." is the biggest part for me. I built something with Antigravity over the holidays that I can use for myself and it solves my use case. I tried thinking about if this can be helpful for others and pushed it a bit further into a version that could be hosted. Which does not make that much sense because it is a computationally intense numerical solver for thermal bridges and just awfully slow on a free hosted platform. But the project was a couple of evenings and would otherwise haven taken me half a year to complete (and thus never been done).
https://github.com/schoenenbach/thermal-bridge https://thermal-bridge.streamlit.app/
I used it with gemini 3 in tandem to build an app to simulate thermal bridges because I want to insulate a house. I explored this in various directions and there are some functionalities not completed or sound, but the main part is good and tested against ISO/DIN test cases for this kind of problem. You can try it here, although the numeric simulations take quite a while in the cloud app
https://thermal-bridge.streamlit.app/
Disclaimer: I'm not a programmer or software engineer. I have a background in physics and understand some scripting in python and basic git. The code is messy at the moment because I explored/am still exploring to port it to another framework/language
Very cool game. Immediately reminded me of pathery, which I can also recommend to everyone who enjoys this.
This is exactly the idea behind the concept of a memory bank that I think Cline introduced first. It serves as a goto for project overview and current scope and goals the project has.
You might want to get into touch with some museums on science topics to see if they are up to show it. I live in Germany at the moment and know of at least two MINT focused museums that let visitors engage a lot with their (sometimes digital) exhibits and this here checks all the boxes to make a great exhibit.
Very well done, I'll try to see if my children will enjoy that already too.
We've had similar struggles and something like a babboe or urban arrow won't fit. I was 95% close to ordering a Libelle https://leichtlast.de/ The non-motorized unsplittable version weighs around 20kg, the splittable slightly more, but it is splittable.
We then settled for a Muli https://muli-cycles.de/en/
I still sometimes think the Libelle would have been cooler but the motor is stronger on the muli and I'm very happy with it too.
A very big database comparing a lot of relevant data can be found at https://www.eurovent-certification.com/
I only used it for air-to-air heatpumps (or air conditioners as they are sometimes called). He the data is oretty good. I can't say anything about the other types of heatpumps but I've found the database quite useful.
There's been a recent video by the German "Sendung mit der Maus" (basically how does stuff work for little children) about these kind of generators. I did not double check if the company in the video is the German one mentioned in the article, but chances are high. Video and subs are in German only, but it's less than 10 minutes and one can see a little how it works.
The most efficient air-to-water heatpumps are using propane. Just look for lambda and ovum from Austria.
Came for this comment. Why is there no COP/SCOP mentioned at all... If you want to get into the market you should be competitive. And the COP of 4.0 you mention is actually the lower end. I'm heating with an AC as air-to-air heatpump now for the second winter and I chose the most efficient that I could get with a SCOP of over 6. And for the first winter I also could reach these numbers.
Have a look what's being used in the Nordics in Europe. Sweden has 90% share of heat pumps for residential heating systems for example. I've got a Panasonic that heats to -35°C as advertised by the manufacturer and-40°C as tested in the lab.
Just created an account to post exactly this. How such a statement could make it into the article is really baffling.
Of the most efficient heatpumps in Europe, most are running on propane, which has negligible GWP ( global warming potential https://hydrocarbons21.com/ipcc-includes-gwps-for-hydrocarbo... ) see for example https://lambda-wp.at/ (only in German, sorry)
Also, air conditioners for the private home can run on propane , see https://www.green-cooling-initiative.org/news-media/news/new...