For those of you who know we are planning at some point to launch a JK MicroSystems picoFlash single board computer at the Ypsilanti Food Cooperative to do the data collecting, we wanted to let you know we have completed the housing for the card. The programming of the card is nearing completion as well and we hope to have the whole unit mounted and collecting data soon.
Here is a picture of what the housing looks like.
JK microsystems picoFlash Single Board Computer Housing
A code update happened this morning and the changes were put into the SourceForge subversion repository (revision #6). The consumption chart was modified to better show actual consumption and a couple of bugs were fixed.
We have gone and done it again. There is now another chart you’ll need to learn to interpret. This one is a consumption chart that show where the electricity used is coming from. To view this chart, bring up the Daily Chart for a live location and click the ‘Show Consumption’ checkbox. The chart will change within a few seconds to the consumption chart.
For those interested in the code behind this wonderful advancement, it has been submitted to the subversion repository hosted by Sourceforge for the SolarYpsi project. Please, go to the project page (here) and rate us thumbs up! It will make us feel better.
Yesterday, June 8, HDL (the host of SolarYpsi’s website) experienced problems that are believed to be related to the recent Denial of Service attacks launched against various websites, including some of the United States government. They worked quickly to get us back online and we want to thank them for their effort.
Unfortunately, there are significant gaps in the data from June 8. The SolarYpsi development team is working on a solution to help prevent the loss of data in the future if this should happen again.
Unfortunately, the method of data collection we had employed for this project (namely MySQL) has caused HDL (our generous site host) many problems. It was bad enough that they were forced to shut down the SolarYpsi.com website. We want to say that the development team is very sorry for the problems caused. These problems have prompted us to re-evaluate how the site manages the data from a location and we have just completed the launch of a new database free method. This should allow us to stay in the good graces of HDL and it is a more direct approach to the data.
The SolarYpsi project is now hosted on Sourceforge, the internet home for open source projects. We will be managing code releases through Sourceforge from now on and you are welcome to download the code through Subversion.
A bug in the caching code was uncovered on June 1st. It has been corrected and the updated code is available on the SolarYpsi.com website.
A new usage chart has been created to display the amount of electricity used by a location and how much of that electricity was generated by the solar panels. The code that created this has been added to the PHP package and the package was updated on the website.
Today (May 10, 2009) the Ypsilanti Food Cooperative generated enough electricity through the solar panels that some electricity was put back into the electricity grid for credit from DTE. This is the first time we have seen this happen since meter monitoring went online on April 17, 2009.
The current weather conditions are now displayed on the webpage so the solar generation output makes more sense. The sunnier it is, the higher the generation. You can also now view previous day and week charts for any generation site. Sunrise, local noon, and sunset times are displayed on the daily chart now and back through May 2nd. Small layout changes were also made.
The PHP code available through the website now has a sample index page and includes the javascript related to the charts that is used on the SolarYpsi.com website and the FusionCharts Free chart used to display the data.
The code for the meter monitoring program and the PHP scripts that process the data on the website have been uploaded and are available for download here.