Sunbottle

Sunbottle is a tool for automatically collecting your generation, purchase and selling, and storage of electricity.

It currently works with Sharp's Cocoro Energy in Japan, but can be extended to support additional systems.

Deploying

Sunbottle is a standard Python/Django application, so you are able to host it anywhere. However, I recommend fly.io because it's where I run mine and have included instructions.

The application should be configured with 1024MB of memory to run stably.

Clone this repository

$ git clone 

Make block storage

Add block storage so your readings and generation data will persist across deploys.

fly volumes create sunbottle_data --region nrt --size 3

Add the storage to your fly.toml so the server can use it.

[mounts]
source="sunbottle_data"
destination="/opt/sunbottle/data"

Generate a secret key

Generate a secret key for the application using the command below.

$ python3 -c "import secrets; print(secrets.token_urlsafe())"

Set Secrets

Set the following secrets:

$ flyctl secrets set DJANGO_SECRET_KEY=<my_secret key>
$ flyctl secrets set SHARP_LOGIN_MEMBERID=<my_member_id>
$ flyctl secrets set SHARP_LOGIN_PASSWORD=<strong_password_here>
$ flyctl secrets set ALLOWED_HOSTS=<my_domain>
$ flyctl secrets set DB_NAME=</opt/sunbottle/data/db.sqlite3>

Ensure the DB_NAME includes the path of your block storage so your data will persist across versions.

ALLOWED_HOSTS should include at a minimum your fly.dev domain. Multiple domains should be separated by a comma.

Deploy sunbottle

$ flyctl deploy

Run migrations

Connect to the server and run migrations.

$ flyctl ssh console
$ cd /app
$ python manage.py migrate

Add super user

So you can access the Django admin.

$ python manage.py createsuperuser

Register your battery / generator

Visit /admin/electricity/battery/add/ to register your battery in Sunbottle. Capacity is in kWh. Next, visit /admin/electricity/generator/add/ to add a name for your solar array.

Test scrape

After setup is complete, Sunbottle will automatically scrape generation, battery level, purchasing, and selling of electric every half-hour.

Before that, it's good to run a test scrape to confirm everything is working.

$ python manage.py scrape_everything

After about 15 - 20 seconds, this should complete. Refreshing the main page should show data.

Back-filling historical data

Sunbottle can also be used to scrape historical data. You can do so by running the scrape_everything command and including a date at the end.

$ python manage.py scrape_everything 2022-10-18

Plugins

To add support for your own system to Sunbottle, you'll need to implement 3 Retriever sub-classes:

• generation.GenerationRetriever
• storage.StorageRetriever
• buysell.BuySellRetriever

Each Retriever will be given a headless Firefox webdriver and an optional date that indicates which date should be retrieved.

The same Firefox instance is used across all retrievers in a single command.

Once implemented, store them in the domain package e.g. sunbotle.domain.my_system.

Next, instruct Sunbottle to use these retrievers by setting the following environment variables/secrets:

$ flyctl secrets set GENERATION_RETRIEVER_CLASS=sunbottle.domain.my_system.MyGenerationRetriever
$ flyctl secrets set STORAGE_RETRIEVER_CLASS=sunbottle.domain.my_system.MyStorageRetriever
$ flyctl secrets set BUYSELL_RETRIEVER_CLASS=sunbottle.domain.my_system.MyBuySellRetriever
$ flyctl secrets set CONSUMPTION_RETRIEVER_CLASS=sunbottle.domain.sharp.consumption.SharpConsumptionRetriever

Generation

Generation retrievers should run a list of GenerationReading objects, which is the datetime and kWh of electricity generated.

from selenium import webdriver

from sunbottle.domain.electricity import generation


class MyGenerationRetriever(generation.GenerationRetriever):
    def retrieve(
        self,
        browser: webdriver.Firefox | None = None,
        date: datetime.date | None = None,
    ) -> list[generation.GenerationReading]:
    ...

Battery level

from selenium import webdriver

from sunbottle.domain.electricity import storage


class MyStorageRetriever(storage.StorageRetriever):
    def retrieve(
        self,
        browser: webdriver.Firefox | None = None,
        date: datetime.date | None = None,
    ) -> list[storage.StorageReading]:
    ...

Buy/Sell Electric

from selenium import webdriver

from sunbottle.domain.electricity import buysell


class MyBuySellRetriever(buysell.BuySellRetriever):
    def retrieve(
        self,
        browser: webdriver.Firefox | None = None,
        date: datetime.date | None = None,
    ) -> list[buysell.BuyReadin | buysell.SellReading]:
    ...

Consumption

from selenium import webdriver

from sunbottle.domain.electricity import consumption


class SharpConsumptionRetriever(consumption.ConsumptionRetriever):
    def retrieve(
        self,
        browser: webdriver.Firefox | None = None,
        date: datetime.date | None = None,
    ) -> list[consumption.ConsumptionReading]:
        ...