Time to read: 2 min
One of the best parts about working at Fictiv, located in the heart of San Francisco, is that we’re constantly surrounded by some of the world’s most talented engineers and industrial designers, building the next generation of hardware products. To give you a view into this exciting and rapidly growing world, we started a new video series called Hardware Generation, where Fictiv CEO Dave Evans visits top hardware companies around the San Francisco Bay Area to learn about how they’re using the power of engineering to change the world.
In our latest edition of Hardware Generation, Fictiv CEO Dave Evans heads to Davis, CA to meet up with Yezin Taha (CEO) and Ky Krieger (Lead Mechanical Engineer) of Nevados Engineering. Nevados is building a single-access, all-terrain solar tracker, which enables installation on sloped land and can produce 25% more energy compared with traditional fixed tracking systems.
Yezin and Ky walk us through the importance of solar innovation, outlining major challenges and considerations in engineering large industrial mechanics at scale, including:
- How they moved from one-off fabrication processes like plasma cutting and welding to off-the shelf components to iterate quickly and get closer to manufacturability at scale. (1:48)
- The challenge of shadowing in solar production (2:50)
- How they improve torque in their design by varying the input and output angle of the panels through their flexible bearing design (3:13)
- + if your kinematics equations are a bit rusty, don’t worry—Dave breaks it down at 3:33
Check out the full video below and be sure to subscribe to our youtube channel for the latest updates.
