ECOFACT

ECOFACT was the main project I worked on while at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technologies. The goal was to develop a dynamic "plug and play" sensor box based on a Wago PLC.

During my time working on it, I was left to come up with my own development solutions and was only really restrained by solving the task we laid out later. The ultimate goal was to measure the power of two solar panels. One panel would be regularly cleaned by opening a valve to a water hose (yes, not "just" a sensor box), while the other would not. The system would also measure the temperature with a connected temperature sensor.

These individual components would all run in their own Docker containers, as modularity was an important factor, and then communicate with one another via MQTT. Finally, the results would be packaged and timestamped and would be sent to a REST API where they were saved in an SQL database. This is where the connection to the wider ECOFACT system would be made.

As this is a publicly funded project, the results and inner workings are mostly known and explained on their website (i.e Official Information).