breakingbytes/pvfree

Free PV API

PV Free

A public API for PV modeling parameters and pvlib API for learning about solar.

Announcements

pvfree is moving to Microsoft Azure Cloud b/c Heroku free dyno service will end Nov 28th. Please use https://pvfree.azurewebsites.net/ from now on to get module and inverter parameters for pvlib and to learn about solar energy modeling.

Usage

Browsing to pvfree.azurewebsites.net/api/v1/pvinverter/ will display a JSON string with the first 20 records. The endpoint and query string to obtain the next set api/pvinverter/?limit=20&offset=20 is contained in the next key of the string as are the endpoints for each inverter. Note: the query string ?format=json is only necessary when using the API url directly in a browser to display the response.

Tastypie

The API is generated by the Tastypie django extension. Add the following endpoints to the base URL, https://pvfree.azurewebsites.net/:

• Get first 20 pvinverters.

    api/pvinverter/
  

• Get first pvinverter.

    api/pvinverter/1/
  

• Get pvinverter set containing #'s 2, 3, 5, and 10.

    api/pvinverter/set/2;3;5;10/
  

• Get 100 pvinverters starting from pvinverter # 500.

    api/pvinverter/?limit=100&offset=500
  

• Get pvinverter database schema.

    api/pvinverter/schema/
  

Python Requests

Python has several libraries for interacting with URLs. The Requests package is available from PyPI.

>>> import requests
>>> response = requests.get('https://pvfree.azurewebsites.net/api/v1/pvinverter/set/1;3;5/')
>>> response
  <Response [200]>
>>> response.status_code
  200
>>> response.content
  {"objects": [{"C0": -2.48104842861e-05, "C1": -9.0149429405099999e-05, "C2": 0.00066889632690700005, "C3": -0.018880466688599998, "Idcmax": 10.0, "MPPT_hi": 50.0, "MPPT_low": 20.0, "Paco": 250.0, "Pdco": 259.52205054799998, "Pnt": 0.02, "Pso": 1.7716142241299999, "Sandia_ID": 1399, "Tamb_low": -40.0, "Tamb_max": 85.0, "Vaco": 208.0, "Vdcmax": 65.0, "Vdco": 40.242603174599999, "id": 1, "manufacturer": "ABB", "name": "MICRO-0.25-I-OUTD-US-208", "numberMPPTChannels": 1, "resource_uri": "/api/v1/pvinverter/1/", "source": "CEC", "vintage": "2014-01-01", "weight": 1.6499999999999999}, ...]}

pvfree's Issues

BUG: searching for name SMA in inverters crashes

the queryset is screwing up the vintage list display

Use iframe for solpos results

• See bootstrap
• Also start sentence with

Enter fields and click submit to see what API GET request looks like, results below

• Also add bokeh plot

Use bokeh

• Replace mpld3 in PV modules
• Add more details to each module like parameters and IV curves

document the pvlib solarposition api

there is no documentation for the pvlib/solarposition api

investigate and consider using BokehJS instead of VegaLite

BokehJS can be used directly in HTML <script> just like Vega. Since already using Bokeh for Python plots, maybe use Bokeh everywhere for uniform look? Does Bokeh have performance or usage advantages?

pvlib solarposition api returns 404 instead of 400 or more relevant info

if using pvlib/solarposition api and parameter is wrong, instead of getting a meaningful return, I get 404, with no info about why my request is wrong

use celery for uploading new SAM dumps

problem:

SAM files, esp. CEC modules are too big, and gunicorn or heroku times out after 30 seconds, files more than 0.5mb are too big, CEC modules is 3.2mb, by comparison inverters is 600kb and Sandia modules is 200kb.

proposals:

1. use celery
   • see https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/celery-heroku
   • http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/latest/django/first-steps-with-django.html
2. provision heroku redis free add-on (with credit card verification)
3. create uploads model to record uploads, and make it easier to pass them to tasks by django id,
   • record user id who uploaded SAM file
   • when uploaded
   • upload file itself
   • log of new records uploaded, existing records, defaults used, and/or errors
4. send upload model primary key (id) to message broker (redis) to retrieve upload file and call model's upload method,
   • can probably consolidate all of those upload methods in one place, using handlers as needed
5. save log, in uploads table, and users can look at their leisure

other options:

• https://channels.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

update landing page to include modules, badge, pvlib, etc.

• the landing page is outdated, it only shows examples for pvinverters
• it should also show pvmodules examples
• and eventually cec_modules
• also should explain the difference between the programmatic interactive web-API pages and the human interactive web-app pages like pvmoduldes/id/
• also just get rid of the java examples
• and update the filter examples

pvlib solarposition api crashes if no frequency

if I don't set the freq parameter then I get 500 server error

Add map to solpos calc

Use leaflet

update to newer django, remove south migration dependency

This app is using django-1.6.4 which predates Django migrations, so it depends on South. I think I did this originally for a number of reasons, mainly because alwaysdata was limited, but then later because tastypie was. However this is no longer the case, both alwaysdata and heroku can support any version of django, and tastypie as of v0.14.0 can support any LTS version of Django, currently versions 1.8 and 1.11.

I know this will be painful and annoying, but I think it will make changes in the future much easier, especially since South is completely deprecated, their documentation has been taken down, and can only be viewed from the South BitBucket repo.

replace travis with gh-actions

travis isn't even running anymore

update SAM versions

pvfree/parameters/models.py

Lines 278 to 280 in 00b3772

	VERSION = [
	(0, ''), (1, 'MM105'), (2, 'MM106'), (3, 'MM107'), (4, 'NRELv1'),
	(5, 'SAM 2018.9.27'), (6, 'SAM 2018.10.29')

latest version is 2020-11-29 so this list is quite out of date

update dependencies

many dependencies are so out of date

• pandas
• numpy
• scipy
• django

retire heroku

after nov 28th, 2022, it will be no more

• remove it from allowed hosts
• remove announcement

Copy inputs from solpos to linke and vv

Don't do this automatically, instead add copy button to webpage, next to submit