The research team has created a platform for the needs of SMART Living Lab several other research projects that involve data acquisition. The platform acts as a centralised database, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, graphing platform and application programming interface (API), for 18 microcontrollers, 30 prosumer home installations, more than 150 smart wi-fi devices, and electric meters that log over 1200 different metrics every year. The platform is created from scratch using a data-oriented database, namely mongoDB, four programming languages (PHP, Python, Javascript, HTML), and a self-hosted virtual machine with the necessary software and hardware requirements to sustain the platform. Measurements from different sites, such as prosumer installations with PV+storage systems or the Living Lab, are automatically gathered and uploaded in a daily or weekly basis, and a report is automatically e-mailed to all the involved researchers as means of verification for the uploaded data integrity. The stored data can be easily downloaded in excel or comma separated files for the time period that the user has selected, via the user-interface or using the API. The platform has been nicknamed SMART and is available in https://smart.ece.uowm.gr/. The existent platform is scheduled to host the Open Access Database that will be developed in the project.
SMART Platform includes the following:
- Measurement database
- Data presentation and download
- Real-time data acquisition from sensors and APIs
- API interface
- Living lab SCADA
- Online tools for circuit simulation, smart grid simulation, PV and BESS optimisation
- VEGA-based graphing platform
- Power-hardware-in-the-loop & Superconductivity lab data
- Forecast database