Idea for the Open IoT Challenge 2.0
IoT-ing a mountain’s hut off-grid solar power system
In short the idea is to add extra sensors and connectivity to the off-grid solar power system of a mountain hut to gain more insides into the generated and used energy.
I’m member of a club that operates a small climbers hut in the mountains. The hut has a small off-grid solar power system that generates the electricity used to provide light in the hut. Lately we had some issues that the energy generated during the week, did not last for the whole weekend the hut is operated. So we replaced the already old charge controller with a new charge controller with Maximum Power Point Tracking. The new charge controller just provides some 5 LEDs show operating states but no details about the generated or used energy.
The IoT-ing idea is to add current and voltage sensors, a microcontroller with a display and GPRS module to show the energy information locally and to store it to the cloud for history and further analysis.
