AWS Cloud for Monitoring Solar Energy Consumption in Households

Solution

The Solar Manager consists of two parts: a Solar Manager device based on Raspberry Pi 3 which is installed in the house and a Solar Manager Cloud that performs calculations. The Cloud also includes an IoT platform to manage the Solar Manager devices. Our team at Integra Sources developed the Solar Manager Cloud, an energy-efficient system for monitoring the consumption of solar power in households.

Scope of work

• Designed AWS cloud architecture, implemented integrations between different cloud services.
• Developed software based on Python for Raspberry Pi.
• Built a web dashboard for the end user and admin that displays power consumption graphs.
• Built a mobile dashboard on a stack of Android and iOS SDKs with a stripped-down functionality.

Technologies Used

• XCode was used for iOS mobile application development.
• Android Studio was used for Android mobile application development.
• The AWS mobile SDK for Android and iOS were used to build connected mobile applications using AWS.
• The software for the dashboard was implemented using LAMP stack while utilizing EmonCMS library for energy visualization.
• Python AWS SDK was used as a package for MQTT protocol support out of the box.
• PyCharm was used for Raspberry Pi software development.
• The software for Raspberry Pi was implemented using Python.

Result

Solar batteries get installed at home as an alternative source of energy in addition to traditional sources. Solar batteries have a single board computer (SBC) whose job is to calculate how much energy home appliances use every day.

The SBC gathers the information on energy consumption and transfers it to the AWS cloud. A user can see their solar production, total electricity use, and the power consumption of their main appliances via a dashboard displayed on the web or mobile user interfaces. With these data at hand, homeowners can discover how to reduce their energy consumption.

The system was going to support up to 5000 new users per year and we needed to make it possible for the solution to manage this increased data flow. Our client received the solution in a timely manner with all the required features.