Initial Software and Solar Server Development

The initial goal was to log data from the solar power system and display it in a human-friendly way via a solar powered server.

Retrieving data from the EP Solar Tracer charge controller is done with python via modbus communication. The script we are using was built-off of work Alex had done previously. The EP Solar Tracer Git Hub repository includes a few different implementations and tools for communicating with the charge controllers. Because we need to log the data, we’re using the Raspberry Pi implementation.

https://github.com/alexnathanson/EPSolar_Tracer

Our initial server is a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). We chose this type of server because of how common and accessible it is.

Instructions for installing the LAMP server can be found here at https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/lamp-web-server-with-wordpress.

The solarserver Git Hub repository contains the solar powered website content, which is presently written in HTML, PHP, Javascript, and uses the Google Charts API to graph the data. The repository will evolve as we go along.

https://github.com/alexnathanson/solarserver

The next steps will be to develop a low-res testing and benchmarking setup for determining the energy consumption of particular server activity.