Latest News on the site
The front page has news on the latest news about the website. If we make a big change we will post an article there. The is also an automatically generated list of pages at: http://www.pveducation.org/tracker However, many of the changes are administrative changes not real changes to the content.
Navigation
The PVCDROM is designed to be read like a book. There are links to the next and previous pages at the top of each page and in the footer bar.
On the left side of the page is a table of contents. Click on the chapter headings to see the contents of a chapter. Click again to collapse the chapter and just show the heading.
Check your understanding
We are in the process of adding questions on each page. Answering these questions will help you check your understanding and help you to remember the content on this page. Responses to these questions are anonymously recorded and patterns will be analyzed by pveducation.org staff. We will be improving the content of the website and these questions based on patterns in the responses.
Browser compatibility
The PVCDROM uses interactivity and animations to explain concepts in photovoltaics. To see all the content requires a canvas and javascript enabled brower that supports plugins for flash, shockwave and Java. Most modern browsers work fine but the exception is Internet Explorer 8. If you are on Windows XP there is no option to upgrade to Internet Explorer 9 so the best option is to switch to Chrome or Firefox.
Live Calculation
Spread throughout the document are mini-calculators for the equations in the text. Enter numbers in the blue fields. Javascript is required for the live calculations and is present on nearly all browsers.
Enter very large or very small numbers using the standard exponential notation. For example, 1 000 000 (106) is entered as 1e6.
Flash Player
Most of the animations are now in Flash. It is available on most computers, including linux, but not on the iPhone or the iPad. Go to the page Properties of Light where you should see animated photons moving across the screen.
Shockwave
Shockwave is needed for some of the animations but we are phasing it out. To check if shockwave is installed go to http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome/
If you do not have Shockwave installed, download it for free from the Internet.
Unfortunately Shockwave is not available for Linux. We are gradually phasing out the shockwave animations. They are only a very few of them now and the plugin causes a lot of problems. It will mysteriously stop working on some computers for some animations.
Java
Most computers already have Java installed. If not, you can get the latest version at www.java.com/getjava/
The java animations are only used for the live graphs and are being phased out as of 2012
Appearance
Press F11 on most browsers to make the pages fit the screen.