Archived Forum

Adding a "H" option to show 1 hour of data is a one-line change in emoncms on the Pi ....

File /var/www/emoncms/Modules/app/mysolarpv/mysolarpv.html

Insert a line above the "D" option at line 56:

<span class='visnav time' time='0.04167'>H</span> |

The time parameter is the number of days, and 0.04167 is 1/24 which will show 1 hour of data.

Thanks Steve, I've been keeping your suggestions in mind and now that I have a tablet dedicated to being an energy display with the display on all the time, have a better platform to test and develop on, I've made the changes you suggested to make it work better as an always on display and I've added a few others:

• The view now automatically updates as a rolling window, in any of the modes, 3 hour, 6 hour, day etc
• The balance Import/Export is now the same size as the solar & house consumption.
• Night time noise on the solar pv channel less than 10W is zeroed.
• The in-window stats are now easier to see at a distance with larger font.
• The view buttons are easier to click on a touch screen
• Its possible to make up the consumption or solar generation feed from multiple feeds on the fly by entering comma separated feed id's in the configuration interface.

Here's the result:

Upgrading

to upgrade on the emonpi or latest emonbase image navigate to the admin tab in emoncms and then run the update tool. Otherwise the app's module can be downloaded and updated using git:

http://github.com/emoncms/app

Trystan,

Jolly good!  Will download the update soon.  Many thanks.

Trystan,

Nice work on the "MySolar" app. The larger fonts make it much easier to read.

Suggestion: Make the solar night time "noise" a user adjustable parameter. My system produces ~45W of "noise" during non-production hours. From what I've seen on the forum, other users have the same issue, i.e. more than 10W of "noise" during the night.

Cheers!

Bill

The improved app works well (I'm using an early Nexus 7 tablet as a permanent display).
More ideas ....

• POWER NOW is not followed by a colon, therefore EXPORTING should not be.
• Axis labels are just about readable on a monitor but too small on a tablet.  Can the contrast be turned up (more white, less grey) and the size increased?
• Suggest the lower labels HOUSE - SOLAR - DIRECT - FROM GRID move to below the numbers.  This will help on landscape tablets where vertical space is tight.
• When wattages are low, rounding errors come into play like in my screenshot where 1.8 displays as 98% of 1.8.  Currently all numbers are toFixed(1).  Suggest to increase the precision when values are small, aiming for 2 significant digits ....

Add in some common place:

// Like toFixed() but alter precision to show 2 significant digits
function myFixed(n)
{
        var val=Math.abs(n);
        if (val > 99.999) return n.toFixed(0)
        else if (val > 1.999) return n.toFixed(1)
        else if (val > 0.1999) return n.toFixed(2)
        else return n.toFixed(3)
}

Then in mysolarpv.js, replace for example
total_solar_kwh.toFixed(1)
with
myFixed(total_solar_kwh)

Steve

Looks good on a tablet, but would the additional information/buttons render OK on a smaller smartphone (and be selectable), or are you using different stylesheets to format the page according to the device/browser used?

Also, agree that 10W noise level threshold is too low. I tried numerous different values before settling on 20W which works fine for me, although I suspect that the noise level will be different from one inverter to another.

Paul

Dont forget converting graphical apps to dashbords will allow to better introduce config changes and mix other feed data on the same screen. See: http://www.openenergymonitor.net/emon/node/10766

Looks good on a tablet, but would the additional information/buttons render OK on a smaller smartphone (and be selectable)

Hi Paul,

Viewing the My Solar App on my Motorola phone with a 4.3 inch screen is actually usable!  The buttons are selectable without any problems and the index values render OK. One anomaly I noticed was the Show balance button is not even with the rest of the buttons (on my phone it's displayed on the graph frame), but once clicked, and the text changes to hide balance, the button moves up into alignment with the rest of the row.

One other thing, the overall height necessitates a vertical scroll to be able to view the HOUSE, SOLAR, DIRECT, and FROM GRID labels and associated values.

Bill

Thanks Bill, that was my concern as there seems to be a lot on detail on that one line. Maybe should be renamed to 'Balance' to fit, or limit the selectable time periods??

Paul

Renaming it to Hide Bal/Show Bal would do it. I like having the 3hr and 6hr buttons. ;-)

My noise level from 12 Renesola Micro Inverters is around 38W. Using -38W and Allow Positive gets rid of it and curiously doesn't seem to screw up the lower readings.

I just updated and now I have no graph on Chrome / IE / Iphone6 Safari. The Solar Text is also off the right hand side of the screen on the iphone.

On the PC clicking Dashboard > My Electric gives a readable graph with a black background, however

Dashboard > My Solar gives a white space where the graph should be

Dashboard > My Electric > My Solar gives a white space where the graph should be

Fortunately I had an old copy of the Apps folder kicking around :-)

I use the emoncms.org website "My Solar" page all the time. Will all of these recent updates be applied to the website pages?

Thanks.

I too use the emoncms.org website and graphs for the My Solar are all blank and values 0.
The settings page is also not visible so I don't know if the feed values need to be amended.

I updated the emoncms.org mysolar and myelectric app's yesterday, @bruce_miranda are you able to click on the spanner icon to bring up the settings page? can you refresh and resave the settings?

I had the same symptoms at emoncms.org/mysolarpv -- white background and zero values.

The spanner icon was hard to find because it was white on white.  Re-saving the settings made no difference but normal service was resumed after I changed one of the feed numbers, saved, then saved again with the original number.

Yes same for me. The mysolar app isn't working anymore. White background and zero figures. It was working until yesterday.

I had the White space and zero values initially.  Following reboot,  problem solved (In my case anyway).

Personally I would like to read the House,Solar, Direct and From Grid  as all values in a line and not split between values and percentages halfway along with the remaining values in smaller tpe below.  Problem here is we are into preferences, and to make these configurable would ruin the simplicity of the app.

Paul G.

The spanner icon was hard to find because it was white on white.  Re-saving the settings made no difference but normal service was resumed after I changed one of the feed numbers, saved, then saved again with the original number.

Thanks. Did this and all OK now, back to a Black background.

Yes it's back to the black background and reconfigured display but it's not updating, at least for me it's not.

Just to add to my previous post. It's not updating for me in IE11. Tried clearing browser cache but to no effect.

It is working ok in Chrome but initially I got a white background and no graphs after clearing browser cache I now have it working with new layout and data updating.

Solar app update works fine for me in both Firefox and Chrome after clearing browser history and then restarting the browser. Also works OK using Silk on Kindle Fire HD.

Jez

I've fixed the config issue that presented as a white screen with no values with the solarpv app. Fixed on emoncms.org and changes available for download.

This is what it looks like on a HTC One M8 phone.

Any chance of shortening 'FROM GRID' to 'GRID' 

Also, as the < & > navigation icons have now rolled onto 2 lines, they are overlapped by the graph layer, and therefore not selectable.

Paul

I made a few changes to make the solar app display better on smaller devices such as smartphones.

• Removed the colons from 'importing' & 'exporting' labels to be consistent with the other labels
• Reduced the font size of the power readings slightly so that they don't look cramped (using a CSS rule which only affects small devices such as phones in portrait view - for Tablets & Laptops, & landscape phones the font size will be as before)
• Reduced the number of selectable time frame buttons so that they don't run into 2 lines (again via CSS, so all of the buttons will be available in landscape view or tablets/laptops etc). The rationale in choosing 1hr, 8hr & Day is that most users would use their phone to check current performance, rather than analyze historical data which would be easier to do on a larger screen such as laptop/tablet. 
• Changed the label 'FROM GRID' to 'GRID' to ensure alignment with other data.

I have made a pull request for consideration, but if anybody wants, the git clone url is https://github.com/Paul-Reed/app.git

Paul

Looks great!, just merged the pull request, thanks a lot!

Great work Trystan/Paul - this is a great little *app* - use it almost daily!

BTW - my 3.12kW panels just ticked over 1yr since installation - total generation of 3800kWh @ 10.4kWh/day - very happy with performance! Sorry - a bit OT but a little excited :)!

I love this app and use it a lot, great work. I'd love to be able to scroll back in time, but this isn't the easiest with the current navigation controls. Would anyone be interested in a date selection control? I'm likely to develop this locally but could share the patch.

This looks like a really nice app, i am not using solar power myself but its a really nice way to visualize the energy image.

I just want to drop in one very nice visualization i saw once for solar energy.

It looks like a clock, and shows bars in a circular motion. The bars grow higher the time of the day with high production. This simple widget just gives a quick overview that can be used in dashboards. It can be used for anything but the reason i liked it for solar is because it shows in a nice way what hours are producing electricity, and it can quickly be read.

//J

I'm enjoying using the My Solar app on my ipad and it looks great. 

However it doesn't work on my Blackberry Classic using the native browser as I get no graph trace.

A couple of other things would be nice:

When zoomed to one day by hitting the "D" button, it would be nice if the graph started and finished at 00:00 so it actually represents a single date rather than a 24 hour period. This would make the generation and consumption stats showing make more sense and allow easier visual comparison between consecutive days.

Building on the above, is there some way of showing the dates for the period shown on the graph?

Finally, it is possible to stop the graph from showing data after the current time? After zooming and scrolling through the data I always end up wanting to leave the graph showing the current live situation but find it impossible to do so without zooming into the future, as pictured, or refreshing. The inclusion of the spurious data makes the stats meaningless.

Thanks!

I too would like to see when hitting "D" that it shows the current day from 00:00 to the current time.  Showing data from the previous day only bias's the data.

thanks for a great app.