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Two years ago, I installed solar panels on the roof, and was rewarded with enough power to run the house, charge the car, and even run the heat pump for much of the year.
Another reward was the SunPower monitoring system that lets us track the performance of the system and see how each individual panel is working. Naturally, this system only delivers its data to some proprietary cloud system run by SunPower. Just as naturally, SunPower has gone bankrupt, and the monitoring system is now just a useless brick sitting on the wall.
...or at least it would be, had I not gone through the effort of integrating it with Home Assistant — a mildly difficult task involving hooking into a maintenance port on the device itself. So now I have the data out of the monitoring box stored on a local system, under my control, and I don't need to go scrambling for alternatives. I can obsess over my post-solstice data, waiting for production to reach decent levels again — that happens faster if I stare at it, I'm convinced.
Maybe there's something to this free software idea after all.
Another reward was the SunPower monitoring system that lets us track the performance of the system and see how each individual panel is working. Naturally, this system only delivers its data to some proprietary cloud system run by SunPower. Just as naturally, SunPower has gone bankrupt, and the monitoring system is now just a useless brick sitting on the wall.
...or at least it would be, had I not gone through the effort of integrating it with Home Assistant — a mildly difficult task involving hooking into a maintenance port on the device itself. So now I have the data out of the monitoring box stored on a local system, under my control, and I don't need to go scrambling for alternatives. I can obsess over my post-solstice data, waiting for production to reach decent levels again — that happens faster if I stare at it, I'm convinced.
Maybe there's something to this free software idea after all.
@corbet that reminds me of Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather". In that book the whole world has gone to shit due to climate change and protagonists are basically rogue meteorologists who exclusively use open source software because nothing else works anymore.
Come to think of it I don't remember anything about the book other than people discussing some software or some such they're recompiling on their airtight laptop.
The idea stuck with me though, I'm a lowkey software prepper.