---
title: Update on the sunpowered server
date: 2015-05-02 14:54:05
tags: [observability]
series: sunpowered
---

> Update 2023: I no longer hosts those dashboards anymore and the server no longer runs in the form described.
> You could argue I still run sunpowered servers, as my new house has solar PV ;)

Some, rather long, time ago I've added a [custom python](/posts/2014/04/21/adding-voltage-current-measurements-sunpowered-pi/)
data acquisition and graphing to my sunpowered RaspberryPi installation
on the balcony. Since then I've upgraded it to Raspi2 and ported the
data thingy to influxdb + grafana. All 3 of those things I am very
positively surprised by.

RaspberryPi2 - definitely worth the upgrade - it's a speed demon now.  Small caveat - I recommend
installing raspbian from scratch, especially if you had some custom
overclocking config, as these do not seem to be compatible between Pi1 and Pi2. Also RasPi2 needs a microsd card instead of full-sized one. As for
the software - since everything went surprisingly smoothly this post is
not much of a tutorial. Just go to [influxdb](http://influxdb.com/)
and [Grafana](http://grafana.org/) and go through the respective
installation documentation. You need x86 64bit server to host this, so
unfortunately no self-hosting on RaspberryPi - at least I wasn't able to
compile the software there. I've [changed the original python scripts slightly](https://github.com/cyplo/sunpowered/tree/master/software),
to upload the data to influxdb instead of graphing directly via
matplotlib. Then configured grafana to display some cool graphs and that
was pretty much it - you can see the result at
[data.cyplo.net]().

Right now I'm testing 2 different sizes of solar panels and
batteries, hooked at the same time. The ADC is connected as it was
before though, so a TODO is to add more measurements, to see how the
individual  panels' output change during the data and how does it affect
each of the batteries.

{{< gallery dir="galleries/sunpowered-data" />}}