My home doesn't have a garage so I put together a solar trailer, an enclosed trailer with its own solar powered electrical system, workbench and tools. It has its own cellular hotspot and a raspberry pi that controls everything and sends all the solar production statistics, battery charge levels back to a server so I can keep track of how its doing. The pi also creates a live feed for a backup camera on the back of the trailer and streams it over WiFi so I can see it inside the tow vehicle with my phone. Lastly the pi controls all the exterior work lights so I can toggle it from a webpage or an IR remote and when the interior of the trailer gets too hot it turns on a fan to cool it off. It's a bit eccentric, but so am I.
Details
- Solar system is just two 100W panels and a large capacity lead acid battery, plenty to keep the pi online and for infrequent power tool usage
- Raspberry pi 3 is running Debian and is always on and connected to my servers over cellular and VPN
- The Pi has two USB WiFi adapters outside the trailer for better signal, one to connect to home base and the other as a hotspot so when I'm driving I can connect directly to the Pi
- Backup camera is a simple wide angle USB webcam I put in an enclosure, the pi's onboard video encoder takes the stream, compresses it h264 and serves it up over RTSP so I can few it on my cellphone
- All solar production data, battery charge levels, voltages and interior temperatures are sent to my Home Assistant Server over MQTT with a simple BASH script
- The pi talks to the solar controller over a USB to RS-485 converter and uses a python script to pipe it back to my Home Assistant Server over MQTT as well
- There is an IR receiver in the front of the trailer, I use an old IR remote to turn on the work lights as I approach the trailer in the dark
Trailer Website
Trailer Build Photos
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