It occurs to me that what I have built is a solar testbed. This is a word we used to use for computer systems not really made to perform work, but to run experiments. But I haven’t really thought about actual experiments. Some thoughts:

• Full battery cycle: completely drain the battery, perhaps at night, they do a full charge, perhaps in full sun. How long does this take?
• Output Measurement: not clear what the total panel output is. Are all loads coming from the battery, or is power shunted directly from the panels to the load? In the dashboard it isn’t clear if battery current and load current are distinct, or overlapping. I haven’t seen much more than 100W from my 200W panels, but I have only been using about 100W of load.
• Maximum Load: so far I have only put about 50W – 100W of load on the system. Panels are only 200W max, but what happens (of anything) if the load is higher than the panel output? (I suppose this happens right now when there is shade. This all relates to how current is applied to the load).
• Battery Fullness: there isn’t any measure of battery fullness, perhaps as a percent. There is a table that comes with the battery that maps voltage to percent remaining. Perhaps batteries vary too much to include this in the software, but I know I would type in a small table of numbers to see this sort of battery status.
• Raspberry Pi Interface: my next step is to get a Raspberry Pi and load up the Venus OS interface and see what this buys me. I would like to log all the parameters at say, one minute intervals, perhaps averaged over 5 one second measurements. Then run the system for a week or so under a stable load and look at the graphs and see what stands out.