Internet of Things projects are challenging because they are comical exaggerations of the pitfalls you find in distributed computing. In the case of developing a Solar Microgrid Controller, you'll face bonus challenges like "When will the internet be in town?", "How exactly do you talk to a solar panel?", and "How am I going to manage this fleet?"
In this talk, I'll share some of the ways our team leveraged Elixir, Nerves, and Nerveshub to build robust Solar Microgrid Controllers. From the batteries-included features of Nerveshub, an embedded admin panel in Phoenix, and talking to solar meters using NIFS; Elixir was our superpower, and we're just getting started!
Because micro grids can be deployed in remote locations, far from reliable Internet access, data minimization is a must. I'll share how we went about providing full utility data when low bandwidth internet might not be in town until next month.
We'll wrap up by looking at hardware. For this project, we built our own custom board and ported Nerves to it. We'll take a look at some of the considerations you might make if you develop for novel hardware, and what you might do to bring your next project to life with Nerves.