Tony is a Geek

I just forced myself to do an initial inventory check of the "toys" I have in my current "to hand" tech-cave.  I need to draw a picture.  and I'm going to be a rebel and NOT use UML, just cos... (it'll probably end up looking very UML-like, but shush, don't tell the rebel part of my brain that)....so, where are you draw.io (oh it has a new name now, I must remember that) Not that I use the online version, I use the installed offline version - y'know, cos I'm old-skool and (insert lots of reasons here and move on). Okay, I've gone even more old skool and used a pen & paper (I missed a few, believe it or not!), I'll do a digital version later: What am I actually "doing" with these devices? Well a variety of things... okay, nothing really all that useful.  They were purchased / used for various tasks at a specific point in time.  For instance the Pi Zero was bought when it was the latest thing and I naturally bought two, I use...

I nearly "lost" the two leisure batteries due to too much drainage ... and I couldn't figure out how to prevent it.  I did have grand ideas about using an automated switch - I setup an ESP8266 relay switch that  I could invoke from code over the WiFi network.  Then from my dashboard monitoring RPi, I could detect in node-red when the voltage got to a certain level and then make a call out to the ESP8266 and get it to switch on the battery charger and when at certain level then turn it off... Then I sat down & thought about the real problem... the inverter was draining the battery down a few 0.x volts over night.  As it's now the start of December, the amount of charge during the day is not to nothing useful...it might blip every so often and keep the battery topped up above 12.75volts... however, after 4pm, the drain is almost a triangular line downwards unto the 12v or even worse the 11.8v angle! I then found THIS device . For around £12... what was not to lik...

Actually, this isn't exactly related to the Solar Powered pond... it's more to do with the collection of DATA and viewing it. Previously, I was using a node-red dashboard to output the current / live status of the data fetched (via modbus) from the MPPT controler.  This worked a treat...however.... it did tend to crash after a day or so.  Digging a bit deeper; whilst I was saving the data to a stats.csv file (gets re-created upon the RPi restart), this was always a temporary solution and the data should be saved into an InFluxDB... turns out the node-red charts are okay for showing data "for a bit"... but not the 1000s od data points I was giving it every second for days on end, something has to give... analysing the webpage content, the dashboard could grow from a 20-ish MB page up to 400+ MB page; just to show live data. Something had to be done about this....and well, a midday overcast Sunday proved to be the solution. Behold GRAFANA presenting data from an InFluxD...