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BizStream Solar Dashboard

The BizStream Solar Dashboard is an internal project created to show the BizStream team the impact of our solar panels in terms of how much money is being saved and their positive effect on the environment through real-time data.

solar dashboard screen
Technologies
JavaScript, Vue 3
Services
Custom Application, Integration
Industry
Energy

Project Goals

During a hackathon event, a team of one developer (Mark Schmidt) and one designer (Rex Rainey) challenged themselves to create a custom internal dashboard showing real-time data and historical stats from our rooftop solar panels.

  • Real-time data needed to be represented in kilowatt-hours, the number of trees saved, and the amount of money saved. These representations needed to display the lifetime totals and the values calculated from the beginning of the day to the current viewing time.
  • Implement a minimal viable product (MVP) in 8 hours.
  • The dashboard needed to be displayed on a 60-inch high-definition TV.

Results

Here are our stats as of this writing… and they’re increasing every day!

0
MWh
0
Trees
$ 0
Money Saved
BizStream scoreboard displaying the solar dashboard
solar dashboard screen

Ever since we had solar panels installed we wanted to do something interesting with the data we were collecting. So we harnessed our internal skills to put together a real-time dashboard that’s a useful and fun way to visualize the benefits we’ve gained since going solar.

Mark Schmidt
Developer

Challenges

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Design

  • Animating graphics
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Usability

  • Accounting for low-energy collection days
  • The API would only give updates every 15 minutes, making gathering real-time data difficult.
  • The API had a limit on how often it would pull data, limiting the number of users able to view the dashboard in a given amount of time.
clear sky today detail

Solutions

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Design

  • Created a dashboard to fit on a large screen monitor
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Development

  • Complex math, made up of data-driven predictions and variables such as weather conditions, time of year, and time of day, was used to get the most accurate data possible to display "real-time" data, despite the API only pulling data every 15 minutes.
  • A Raspberry Pi is used to run the application on rotating chrome tabs to display the dashboard on our internal scoreboard.
  • An API wrapper was used to cache the calls when the site had a large amount of traffic.
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Integrations

  • SolarEdge API
power today detail

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Ready to get started?

We love to make cool things with cool people. Have a project you’d like to collaborate on? Let’s chat!

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