Thinking about a new project. Just a small solar and battery installation. Will probably just get a few hundred watts of polysilicon panels and use my existing deep cycle SLAB electric riding mower batteries. There are also lots of nice looking, and inexpensive controllers on Amazon. Most of this stuff is available for campers, boaters and RVers. A surprisingly large range of inexpensive gear.

What I really want to do is to be able to monitor and graph a few data items, mostly panel voltage and battery voltage. This is just to get a feel for how these things work in the real world. I did some similar work for large enterprise systems a bunch of years ago and wondered if maybe I could use of of that open source software and a Raspberry Pi. I had a look at Graphite and Grafana and read about a bunch more. All pretty complicated and more than I really need. I guess I’ll just write some python.