Just as the title says, my organization is traveling to Burkina Faso this January to install our first PV project on a women's birthing center remote and far off grid. We want to use an EmonPi or similar to record usage and track energy generation for case study and future grant writing.
I believe the EmonPi PV will work perfectly for this application however I need to overcome the challenge of lack of internet to transmit the data collected. Is there a way to configure the software to store locally so a technician can retrieve the data from the site and later upload it to our server once they get interent access back in town?
Thanks in advanced for your thoughts!
-Travis
Re: Help Us Install and Record PV energy for remote West African Village
Hi Travis,
Thanks for your interest. This sounds like a great project. We would love to help you.
By default the emonPi is ready configured to run Emoncms locally to log, record and visualize data. Data is saved to the Raspberry Pi's SD card. To access the data you could setup the emonPi to create it's own Wifi hotspot which you could then connect to via a laptop or mobile device to view the data / Emoncms dashboards. See our blog post here for how to setup a WiFi hotspot: http://openenergymonitor.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/how-to-setup-wifi-hotspot-on-emonpi.html.
We would love to help you where we can, if you do place an order for your emonPi via the OpenEnergyMonitor store leave a note at checkout stating that you would like to use it offline. We will ensure it has all the most recent updates installed and can add a hardware Real Time Clock to ensure the system time is always correct and setup the wifi hotspot for you.
Please email sales@openenergymonitor@zendesk.com if you would like to discuss this further with me.
Re: Help Us Install and Record PV energy for remote West African Village
are there cell phone coverage at all?
if there are then maybe an arduino GSM modem could be conected in some way?
just my 0.02DKK