I have had a GivEnergy system for a couple of years now and have been very happy with the official app and also the excellent Monitor for GivEnergy Inverter app which I have supported via an In App Purchase as a local control backup if our internet ever goes down or the GivEnergy API ever experiences problems.
This is great for a phone or tablet, and I can use the web based dashboard on a laptop or desktop computer - but I find every so often it would be nice to see system status on my Pixel Watch.
Nothing seems to exist on the Play Store but no bother, GivEnergy seem to have pretty decent API documentation and there are two endpoints which very nicely seem to match the sort of data I would want to display.
Obviously a watch isn't an ideal control interface for something as complex as an inverter system, so I only intend to provide read only status data - which would be API sourced and thus only updated every few minutes.
To make sure I played nicely with the rate limit on the API data would likely be cached until the next update was due.
The app would only call the Get Latest System Data and Get Latest Energy Data endpoints and thus only require the api:inverter:read scope - I definitely wouldn't want the ability to accidentally mess with people's inverters. The app may need to take and store the GivEnergy API keys in order to get the tokens though.
This would very much be a hobby project and not something commercial that I would take payment for. I would however try to get it into the Play Store if it would be useful for people.
It would be pretty minimalist (I am not a designer) and likely just use FontAwesome icons assuming they have everything I need.
I would probably aim to display
- current solar power
- current grid power
- current consumption
- current battery power
- current battery SOC %
- daily solar power
- daily grid import
- daily grid export
- daily battery charge
- daily battery discharge
I would need to experiment but it is likely that solar/grid data would share a view and battery data another to avoid people having to swipe ten times to get to the data they want. So probably four views in total.
So, why am I posting this?
Questions time. Would you want your solar data on your wrist? Does this match with the sort of data you would want?
If I want to get this onto the Play Store it looks like I would need closed testing first. Is there anyone with a GivEnergy system and an Android watch who would be interested in helping to test this?
I am thinking of writing it in .NET MAUI as a good C# refresher/update having changed roles recently to return to .NET after working in Python for a few years. It would be Unit Tested and I would plan on uploading the source to GitHub.
