This is an online dashboard for the solar panels on the 4th floor of OCNL maintained by the Mechanical Engineering department of California State University, Chico. This application tracks sensor data by the minute and daily power data updated at midnight.
This is a 2-part system with one part being the data acqisition end and the other being the data presentation end. The data acquistion consists of two separate systems feeding the sensor and power data. Fluke Hydra Data Logger (sensors) data reports various temperature levels and the Azuray ACM300 reports power data.
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Minute-by-minute sensor updates from the Fluke Hydra Data Logger with autorefresh set for 60 seconds
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Daily updates on power output at midnight from ACM300
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Search enabled graphs to plot DC Power Output by Module, Total DC power Output, Module Temperature vs Time of Day, Solar Irradiance, and Battery Box Temperature.
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Search for raw data by day and time.
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Download raw or transposed data in CSV to import in to Excel.
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Date Tracker which tracks and reports any missing data for a day or a period of days. Based on the fact that there should be at least 24 Hours * 60 Minutes = 1440 Logs each day. It also has a tutorial on importing the missing data.
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Gallery with images of the solar array
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About page
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Simple login system to limit searching, graphing, and downloading (Sorcery Gem)
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Wndows 7 x64
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Fluke Hydra Data Logger
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WinSCP.com (part of WinSCP package)
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System Scheduler (Freeware, more options than Windows Task Scheduler)
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Internet Access / Local access for university network based setup
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Configure ACM300 to send nightly reports over a ftp account.
All the above are made available on the Dell PC under "C:\web_application\ocnl_solar_lab_data_acquistion_set.zip" which includes a README. Except for Windows 7 of course.
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LAMP stack
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Ruby version 2.2.1p85
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Rails 4.2.0
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mySQL
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phpmyadmin
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Bundler
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Apache 2.4.x with Passsenger
The Fluke Hydra Logger dumps data every 60 seconds to a CSV file. The auto-rollover feature only allows us to get data by the hour, but we want the data every minute. There is a PowerShell script "output_last_log.ps1" which reads the last line from the file and outputs it to a log file with the header template on the first line. This log file is then uploaded to a FTP account on the oncl_solar_lab server where a rake task parses and imports the data every minute.
A similar rake task is setup to run at 00:05 every night to import the ACM data.
Please email me and I would be happy to either provide a dataset or fire up a node on AWS to demo the app. The app is purposely designed around a pre-populated schema. Chico State students (behind the firewall/via VPN) can access the OCNL Solar Lab at http://ocnl-solar-lab.ecst.csuchico.edu/. Ask Dr. Greg Kallio for login credentials.
I had to create a poster as part of my Capstone project. The poster has some more information on the solar panels and screenshots from the application. View on Scribd - https://www.scribd.com/document/397833806/CSU-Chico-OCNL-Solar-Lab-Poster