Home Info Panel
I’ve recently updated the solar monitoring app that I built. It started out as a monitoring app for the solar panels and can be seen on this website from the link at the top of the page. The app/plugin currently consists of a couple of pages:
- The Solar and Battery Overview – which shows the general status of our solar panels, the battery status, the flow of power through the various components and some stats for the past 30 days.
- The Records and Averages – This shows the highs and lows and some stats for each month of the year since we’ve been generating.
As well as these public pages I also built a display just for us that is customised to fit on an iPad mini display. We have two old iPad minis that are always on and now display the most important data in an easy to read, at a glance overview. With one in the kitchen and one in the lounge we have an easy way to keep a tab on things.
I also have a professional weather station in the garden that has been recording quality weather data from Borth and Ynyslas since 2005. This too is presented as a number of web pages on this site. There is a small fee to see these pages (which helps with its upkeep), but you can see some examples and more information on the weather station pages here. There are far too many pages and too much data to go into details here, but it has live weather data as well as pages and pages of historical data and analysis of the weather in Borth and Ynyslas over the past 17 years (and counting).
I did create an ‘at a glance’ page for the iPads that showed some of the live weather station data for us. This was in a similar fashion to the page for the solar panels. It was however a separate page so we had to choose which page to display all the time.
I therefore decided to create a third ‘at a glance’ iPad mini page that was an amalgamation of the solar panel data, the battery data and the live weather data. Nothing too ground-breaking but it’s nice to have it all available in one place that is always on allowing us to see it as we walk past. Our ‘Home Info Panel’ now looks like this.
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Hi Alan,
Great work. It’s a limitation of Solax they don’t facilitate retention of data. I assume your SQL accumulates it, so it can also be exported as CSV. Is your solar WP plugin available to download / install/ buy?
Yes, the data I get from the API is stored in the WordPress MySQL database so that I have access to it for historical purposes. I haven’t made the plugin available publicly simply because I haven’t got around to adding a function to create the database tables on set up and I probably use a few hard-coded values here and there. That’s a job for another day (maybe once I’ve retired!!)
Al.