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Phase 4: Now that we are capable of calculating the position of the sun, we want to get rid of the hardcoded values for the time and location. To save the time, we’ll use an extra piece of hardware, namely a Real Time Clock or RTC. The location we’ll store in the flash memory of the ESP32 board or in an EEProm. By doing so, we can power down the ESP32 board, bring it back up and still have correct values for time and location.

Phase 3: Last time we wrote the code for controlling an ESP32 board running the .NET nanoFramework over a Bluetooth connection. In this post we’ll be concentrating on the algorithm that calculates the position of the sun. Note that as said in the post that started this series, we already selected an existing algorithm, but we need to port it to C# and see if the ESP32 board can run it.

Why a Phase 2bis? Like explained in the previous post, we switched hardware from a WROOM to a WROVER ESP32 board. Sole reason is that the WROVER board has more Ram. This allows us to use some nanoFramework libraries like Dependency Injection and Json serialization which require more Ram to run. So, in this post we do the same things like in Phase 2, but we make use of the aforementioned Dependency Injection.

Phase 2: In the last post we’ve setup Visual Studio for developing against the .NET nanoFramework. In this post we’ll be writing our first lines of code. Goal is to test if we can communicate over Bluetooth with our ESP32 board. Now, the code we’ll be writing is not your typical ‘hello world’ program, but more of a foundation for the later work we’ll be doing for making a Heliostat. What we want is that our ESP32 can respond to various commands we send over Bluetooth.

Phase 1: Writing code for the .NET nanoFramework is done using the Visual Studio IDE ( Integrated Development Environment ). The language we’ll be writing in is C#. Both Visual Studio and C# come from Microsoft, and are around for a long time already, so you’ll find them very mature with lots of documentation available. There’s a very good ‘Getting started guide’ by the guys from the .