Samenvatting

The 2021 “HANW@TTS interface” internship project was executed by a third-year student from the Electronics Engineering Department of HAN University of Applied Sciences. One company supervisor and one supervising teacher guide the student during the internship.

The objective of this project can be specified in one sentence - “Improve the functionality and reliability of the SOPRA microgrid prototype and establish a connection and interface to the simulation table”. These were the goals set for the project. The main focus was to improve the connection between the subsystems of the SOPRA microgrid and the user interface for interacting with it, leaving out the establishment of the new common interface between the microgrid and the “Smart Grid” simulation table for the end. This last task was not accomplished because of difficulties reportedly encountered by the other team involved while overhauling the simulation table and quarantine measures that impeded physical testing. Still, microgrid-related software was heavily renovated, and many changes were made to make it more reliable and self-sustaining, and to give users access to more data and interactive features through 2 new websites.

During the development process, a lot of time was spent on deconstructing the old software that lacked documentation, updating, simplifying and improving it. An iterative approach based on Rapid prototyping and Rapid Application Development were used to incrementally change the structure, content of the messages and the parsing process used by the 2 controllers to communicate wirelessly. Preliminary versions and testing were done on test boards on a local network before rolling out changes to the real network.

Even though it was challenging to learn to program GUIs in JavaScript and to understand all the details of how the subsystems work in the beginning, the result is quite robust in terms of error handling and added features in comparison with the start prototype. Much more functionality was implemented to the SOPRA microgrid network in contrast to the first anticipated design in the plan of action, partly because of the delayed development of the simulation table.

Of course, as always, there is room for improvement, which has been summarized in the Issues and Unfinished Tasks part of this report. The team has provided a more reliable and user-friendly product that can only be improved from here on out. In short, besides the connection to the simulation table, the suggested improvements are to: block EV chargers from starting a charge without a valid RFID (- the Olimex controllers do not listen to these signals from the Photons), add a car registering page for users on the website, and move the MQTT clients to the prepared local secured broker.