I needed a way to monitor and control some solar powered stuff in the mountains for western Norway so I made a MODBUS to LoRaWan, Helium, LTE-M or WiFi the PCB that read and writes values from the EPEver range of solar controllers over the mobile network using LTE-M (CAT-M1) EPEver MODBUS the unit works on any MODBUS RTU or RS-485 enabled controllers or equipment.
The PCB uses the pycom.io range of microcontrollers so the PCB can fairly easily be programmed to use LoRaWan, LTE-M, WIFI and BLE communications to stream solar charger data.
I currently send battery temperature, battery voltage, solar W, charging battery and load output to keep the data usage on my mobile plan to a minimum. With some tight packing of the time series the controller only uses 2 MB pr. month with a transmission every 5 minutes to keep data costs low. PCB excepts 7-42v DC inputs and uses a 100mv peak when transmitting so getting power from the EPEver plugs works fine. Connect 4 wires and the unit starts transmitting over the cellular network, takes about 1 minute to set up.
Data is streamed to tingkart.com to visualizing IoT data directly on my phone, iPad or desktop systems. Since I know where solar systems are placed I can get weather data and calculate watts pr. m2 and over time calculate expected solar yields. How much I would expect the panels to output with current weather conditions but also estimation on how much they will produce the next days given weather forecast. You can do a lot of interesting things with this data like calculate if panel production has dropped over time (dirt/debris/snow buildup) to recommend cleaning or generate alerts for stuff like battery temperature, voltages and warnings from the unit.
I made the off grid solar monitoring solution I wanted but now I am wondering if anyone else could be interested in the technology or has this been solved better by someone else.
Image 2:
The PCB uses the pycom.io range of microcontrollers so the PCB can fairly easily be programmed to use LoRaWan, LTE-M, WIFI and BLE communications to stream solar charger data.
I currently send battery temperature, battery voltage, solar W, charging battery and load output to keep the data usage on my mobile plan to a minimum. With some tight packing of the time series the controller only uses 2 MB pr. month with a transmission every 5 minutes to keep data costs low. PCB excepts 7-42v DC inputs and uses a 100mv peak when transmitting so getting power from the EPEver plugs works fine. Connect 4 wires and the unit starts transmitting over the cellular network, takes about 1 minute to set up.
Data is streamed to tingkart.com to visualizing IoT data directly on my phone, iPad or desktop systems. Since I know where solar systems are placed I can get weather data and calculate watts pr. m2 and over time calculate expected solar yields. How much I would expect the panels to output with current weather conditions but also estimation on how much they will produce the next days given weather forecast. You can do a lot of interesting things with this data like calculate if panel production has dropped over time (dirt/debris/snow buildup) to recommend cleaning or generate alerts for stuff like battery temperature, voltages and warnings from the unit.
I made the off grid solar monitoring solution I wanted but now I am wondering if anyone else could be interested in the technology or has this been solved better by someone else.
Image 2:
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