In this document I want to describe my progress building an own solar load controller.
There exist a lot of solar load controller which you can use to build a simple solar power system. Usualy, these load controller do not provide open and well documented interfaces to access data such as:
- Solar panel voltage/current
- Battery voltage
- Consumer current
- Meassure voltage/current
- Send meassured data via mqtt to an mqtt broker
- Collect mqtt broker data and store it in a prometheus database
- Visualize prometheus data on grafana
- Waveshare Solar Power Management Module
- ~6V-24V max PV voltage
- 3,7V Li Battery
- INA260
- 36V max input voltage
- 15A max input current
- Sparkfun Thing Plus is used to read sensor values and send them to the mqtt broker
- Has builtin wifi capabilities for mqtt comunication
- has an integrated i2c quiic port for simple sensor plugging
- Is programmed in C++ using the arduino platform
- All parts will not be fully integrated but left as single modules or will be modularized
- Single modules will be connected via I2C for data exchange
- The modules will be added to a base plate via screws
- This allows to change the design during development and reuse parts for later designs
- A public mqtt broker is be used
- Mqtt is translated to prometheus via mqtt2prometheus
- Prometheus data is vizualised using grafana
- Source code on github