Storm Energy’s SunSniffer charmed by Raspberry Pi!

The humble Raspberry Pi single board computer is indeed going places, receiving critical acclaim for, well, being downright awesome. The latest to be smitten by it is the German company, Storm Energy, which builds products like SunSniffer, a solar plant monitoring system. The SunSniffer system is designed to monitor photovoltaic (PV) solar power installations of varied sizes. The company has now upgraded the system to a Linuxbased platform running on a Raspberry Pi. In addition to this, the latest SunSniffer version also comes with a custom expansion board and customised Linux OS. The SunSniffer is IP65-rated, and the new Connection Box’s custom Raspberry Pi expansion board comes with five RS-485 ports and eight analogue/digital I/O interfaces to help simultaneously monitor a wide variety of solar inverters (Refusol, Huawei and Kostal, among others). In short, the new system can remotely control solar inverters via a radio ripple control receiver, as against earlier versions where users could only monitor their data.

The Raspberry Pi-laden SunSniffer also offers SSL-encryption and optional integrated anti-theft protection.