The goal of this project is to inform me and the members of my family if our solar-panels are producing more electricity than what we're currently consuming.
A process that runs indefinitely reads out the measurements of the HomeWizard P1 device at a certain interval. If it turns out that the solar-panels are producing that much energy that we have a surplus of energy, a signal is triggered in the QBus home automation system that informs the habitants about the energy surplus.
I have this process running on a Raspberry Pi where it is hosted in Kubernetes (k3s). This is actually overkill, but I wanted to experiment with Kubernetes as well. Information on how to install k3s on a Raspberry Pi can be found here.
You can pull the image from Dockerhub.
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Build the project as a container image
docker build . -f Dockerfile-amd64 -t solarpoweralerter:<tag>
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Run the program
docker run solarpoweralerter:001 --network="host"The
--network="host"argument makes sure that the container connects to the host's network.
If you want to run the image on a Raspberry PI, you need to use the Dockerfile-arm32 for building the image.
If you build this container for arm32 on a Windows system, use docker buildx to build the image.
You also need the required emulators. Find information on how to install them here.
Make sure that you have the linux/arm/v7 emulator. Verify this by executing docker buildx ls.
Additional background information for this can be found here.
Once everything is in place, build the image using this command:
docker buildx build . -f .\Dockerfile-arm32 -t solarpoweralerter:<tag>
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Build the container locally
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Tag the container so that it can be pushed to dockerhub:
docker tag solarpoweralerter:001 docker.io/fgheysels/solarpoweralerter:001 -
Make sure to be logged in with Docker Hub via
docker login -
Push the image to the repository
docker push fgheysels/solarpoweralerter:0.0.1 -
Pull image
docker pull docker.io/fgheysels/solarpoweralerter:0.0.1
Deploy the component on a Kubernetes cluster by simply deploying the deployment manifest.
kubectl apply -f .\deploy\k8s\solar-prod-alert.yml -n solar-alert
Following configuration settings are required:
| Setting Name | Value | Description |
|---|---|---|
| HomeWizard__P1HostName | p1meter_015ABC | The hostname of the HomeWizard P1 name. We try to find the HomeWizard in the network via this name |
| QBus__IpAddress | 192.168.1.14 | The IP address of the QBus controller |
| QBus__Port | 8444 | The port at which the QBus EqoWeb API is listening |
| QBus__Username | QBUS | The username of the account that must be used to connect to QBus EqoWeb. Note that the username is case-sensitive |
| QBus__Password | The password of the account that is used to connect to QBus EqoWeb | |
| QBus__SolarIndicators | A comma-separated string that lists the QBus devices that must be notified on Power Usage state changes | |
| PowerUsageThresholds__NotEnoughProduction | 200 | The amount of electricity power (in watt) that must be exceeded to determine that we're consuming more electricity than that we're producing |
| PowerUsageThresholds__OverProduction | -800 | The amount of electricity powser (in watt) that must be passed to determine that we're producing more electricity than that we're consuming |
| PowerUsageThresholds__ExtremeOverProduction | -2500 | The amount of electricity power (in watt) that must be passed to determine that we're producing a whole lot more electricity than that we're consuming |
When the power usage (in watt) is between PowerUsageThresholds__NotEnoughProduction and PowerUsageThresholds__OverProduction, we consider this as a 'break-even' state.