Connecting green energy production to Watson IoT

By bogaert
In my previous blog post I described how I connected the home automation environment to Watson IoT. Now I took it a step further. I connected the values captured by the inverters of the solar production plant to Watson IoT.
On the home side: The inverters is attached to the solar panels and converts the generated DC power into AC and injects it back into the electricity grid. The amount of power generated can be retrieved in real time via the IP network. I added to the small ARM based linux box a new program that makes the connection between the inverters and Watson IoT. The small program in C that does the following:

- Reading of a configuration file, containing
      o MQTT credentials
      o IP address of the inverters
- Setup a connection to the MQTT client
- Monitor the power generated by the inverters and compare to the previous value retrieved. If nothing changed, wait a bit.
- Upon a change publish an MQTT message.
The small linux box is acting as a gateway device, so the connection with the Watson service requires a one-time setup for the gateway itself. Thereafter the devices added by the Internet of Things platform automatically at their first published event.
On the backend side I used Watson IoT on the Bluemix platform. In the IoT platform I created the gateway device and used the credentials on the house side.
Once the connection worked I could see the data coming into the NoSql database. I used the Watson IoT boards functionality to get a glimpse of the data coming in live. Below the standard real time data flowing in. Notice in the diagram below a small cloud passing by that caused to drop the power generation for a very short period.

BlueHome diagram
I also added a board with the current value received by Watson IoT. Below the board.

BlueHome diagram
So, what's next? Wait a bit and capture data for a while, afterwards see which historical analysis I can do on it.