A group of us are developing an application on a MicroPC that integrates with popular brands of charge controllers; currently it is able to read live data and populate a dashboard with the attributes over time.
It has a similar look to the latest commercial Victron app, however, rather than just being accessible via bluetooth, it is accessible from anywhere since it has wifi/cloud functionality. Ultimately, we’d want this to integrate easily into the OpenHab application as a binding. As we focus on refining the product, we wanted to ping your knowledge and experience in this area to see what you guys thought of this!
What potential value would these features help you realize today?
Are there any other connectivity or data-related pain points that solving would give you more value?
I don’t have a solar charger so I can’t answer your main question directly. Though I do know that a lot of users do integrate OH with their solar power generators to do stuff like turning on/off their electric car charging, air conditioning, etc. It’s also helpful to track how much power is generated over time.
Also, I can say that for many openHAB users, having a cloud based API will be an immediate no go. From a strictly openHAB perspective, I and others I’m sure would rather see creation of a local API to integrate with, HTTP or MQTT or the like. Even if it’s some encrypted proprietary API, being able to have local access to the device is highly valued in this community.
This helps give us perspective into preferred system architectures for iterations of our prototypes. Comparing it to another binding favored by the community, it looks like TP-Link has both the local and cloud API, so we would like to mimic that kind of functionality.
In terms of unique functionality, I am curious what other users with charge controllers would like to see, or rather, what is missing in the current data or connectivity related aspects of the devices they use today.
