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How's Your 3D Vector Math?
Akilae729
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm working on a project involving re-directing the sun and I'm trying to figure out the effects of pointing errors in my re-direction mirror.
It is basically a system of three vectors, A, B and C. Where A is my incoming ray, B is the mirror normal, and C is the target. All in 3D.....
My system solves for the mirror angle which is REAL easy. B = (A+B)/|A+B|. This allows me to program a motor drive and keep the sun on a target throughout the day.
What I need to now do is solve for C when given vectors A and B. This will let me introduce different tracking and calculation errors into the system and see the effects at the target.
I know that I can do this relatively easily with rotation matrices but I'd like to keep this project living in EXCEL as opposed to MATLAB.
Can anyone think of a trick way to do this?
It is basically a system of three vectors, A, B and C. Where A is my incoming ray, B is the mirror normal, and C is the target. All in 3D.....
My system solves for the mirror angle which is REAL easy. B = (A+B)/|A+B|. This allows me to program a motor drive and keep the sun on a target throughout the day.
What I need to now do is solve for C when given vectors A and B. This will let me introduce different tracking and calculation errors into the system and see the effects at the target.
I know that I can do this relatively easily with rotation matrices but I'd like to keep this project living in EXCEL as opposed to MATLAB.
Can anyone think of a trick way to do this?
Akilae729 on
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You want N and V to be normalized unit vectors, btw. Vnorm = V/|V| = V/sqrt(Vx+Vy+Vz).
AWESOME. I knew there was a way to do this easily.
(Turns out that MATLAB also has a built in rotation matrix tool also: vrrotvec and vrrotvec2mat)
Let the ray tracing begin!
You're writing a ray-tracer in Excel? Ballsy! I thought you were doing some astronomy project or something.
Its a heliostat, so the only real astronomy is getting my Alt,Az values for the sun but thats what the astronomical almanac is for. The excel is just so I can quick check tracking angles and really basic errors. (Matrices in Excel would probably be lethal)
Now that I've got some basic checks, its full on MATLAB time.