Smart Home Energy Dashboard Project
This project is a small part of my wider smart home solar energy project.
It is all very well having my contextual smart home make really smart decisions for us but, myself and my family can also make decisions that will have an impact on its smart energy management. One thing my smart home can do to minimise that impact and to help us make better decisions, is to display useful information in real-time. This will ensure we manually control appliances at the best time and do not turn several on at once.
My energy dashboard shows useful, colour coded, live information and provides a clear indication of when it is a good time to use each particular appliance in our home.
I've designed my own icons for my dashboard. Green means an appliance will use solar power only, orange means it will use battery power and red means it will use network power. This is based on knowing how power each device uses and how likely it will be on for. The kettle uses 3kW but it is only ever on for a few minutes. Typically, the tumble dryer is one for 30-60 minutes. The oven is usually only on for 45 minutes maximum but, cooking a Sunday roast could mean both our ovens are on for several hours.
The dashboard is a responsive web design and can work on our iPhones, an iPad and our Amazon Echo Show 8. It's implemented using AJAX, PHP, HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
With my Tesla Powerwall installed in April 2023, I finally got access to the Tesla Backup Gateway API, which I've interfaced to my contextual smart home. I can now fully populate my energy dashboard.
E-ink Display
Once I've got this web-based dashboard completed, my plan is to use an e-ink display in our kitchen.
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