An installation you can check from anywhere

A mobile app for monitoring solar panel installations: health, charge, batteries, and the operational data behind them.

FIG. 00

2024Batary EnergyDIRECTTHE HARD PART

The problem

A solar installation reports continuously and is visited rarely. Its state is knowable, but not from where the person responsible for it usually is.

The approach

Carry the array's operational data to the handset and reduce it to the few readings that answer the question someone actually opened the app to ask.

Batary Energy monitors the company's own solar panel installations. The application is React Native on the handset, with an Express backend behind it.

It exists so that the state of an installation is something you can check, rather than something you have to travel to.

01 / What the project is

Three things worth knowing.

The shape of the work, before the part that was difficult.

FIG. 01

The installation is in the field. The person is not.

A solar installation reports continuously and is looked at rarely. The gap between those two facts is the whole reason for a monitoring app.

The job is to carry what the installation knows to wherever the person checking on it happens to be.

FIG. 02

What an installation is doing right now.

The array is the thing being monitored: panels, strings, and the equipment reading them. Operational data comes from there and has to arrive intact.

Live state is the useful state. A reading that is hours old answers a different question from the one someone opened the app to ask.

FIG. 03

Health, charge, batteries.

On the handset it comes down to a small number of readings that say whether the installation is fine: health, charge, battery condition, and the related operational figures.

A phone screen is not a dashboard. The value of the app is deciding what belongs on it and leaving the rest behind.

02 / The hard part

Reading an installation from a phone

Everything worth knowing happens at the array. Everything worth showing has to fit in a hand.

FIG. 01 — HOW IT WORKS

How it works / step 01 of 03

Start at the array.

Panels, strings, and the equipment that reads them. This is where the operational data is produced and where its accuracy is decided.

03 / What you can open

Published and live. The links below go to the project itself.

Batary Energy

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