Over the last few months, we have been working together with the Berlin start-up indielux on a prototype that, to put it bluntly, is revolutionising the market for self-produced electricity.
Under the ready2plugin brand, we are presenting the prototype to the general public at the Intersolar Europe, the international trade fair for photovoltaics in Munich (stand A2.290). At the same time, The smarter E AWARD will be presented and we are already very excited because we are among the finalists!
pv magazine also featured our story on the cover today.
The revolution in renewables
indielux managing director Marcus Vietzke contacted GzEvD already last year - and after some preliminary talks, the trust on both sides was so great that I refreshed the basics of electronics over the turn of the year with a Kosmos construction kit. (If I had paid more attention at school back then, certain sections would have been easier to skip :) But yes: you can't see or taste electricity. Not even today.)
Once the basic requirements for the prototype had been defined, the implementation could begin. In a project where it is a matter of persuading several components to interact, which also come from different manufacturers that communicate via different protocols, a cool head and the selection of the right software components are the be-all and end-all.
Open source software
We were able to use our experience from previous smarthome projects. The open source software communities have also done a great job there and developed powerful software. For the prototype, we were able to put together a combination of openHAB, influxDB, Grafana, MQTT and quite a bit of self-written Python code. In addition to a prototype suitable Raspberry Pi, countless variants of Arduino-compatible development boards wandered across our tables. On the protocol level, we were able to take a closer look at WMBUS, Zigbee and LoRa.
Because we had also bought a Prusa i3 MK2 3D printer last year, we were also able to print the housing for the prototype ourselves.
Everything had to be ready in time. The trade fair date cannot be postponed.
If we have aroused your curiosity, you can also follow our Twitter account. There we will report live from Munich.
