solarshed: solar charge controller monitoring in Python
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Solar power has become a popular alternative energy source for powering homes, electric cars, and other electronics. Combined with a good battery bank, it can provide a good solution for many off-the-grid scenarios.
About a year ago, my brother and I constructed a solarshed trailer that acts as a convenient power source for us in rural SC. I use it for powering phones, tablets, computers and it also helps out for business continuity during a power outage. We also use it for power tools, topping off golf cart batteries and temporary power for RVs and campers. The trailer contains a 400 watt solar panel array along with four 100Ah 12 volt batteries wired in parallel. The batteries are managed by a Renogy Rover solar charge controller. We selected the Rover model based on the RS232 port it provides for data collection. A raspberry pi is installed inside the trailer for continuous monitoring of the solar charge controller, solar power generation and the battery bank. This data is collected by Prometheus and Grafana is used for visualizations and dashboards.
In this meet up, we'll begin by reviewing the solarshed1 trailer's design and then go over the methods used by the solarshed Python library to gather important metrics from the solar charge controller. We'll cover the use of the Prometheus client in the solarshed Python process for metrics collection and scraping. Then we'll wrap up by reviewing some visualizations and dashboards that help me keep an eye on the solarshed during our daily use of it.
Related links:
https://github.com/corbinbs/solarshed
https://pypi.org/project/solarshed/
https://www.renogy.com/rover-li-40-amp-mppt-solar-charge-controller/