One screen showing every solar site, pulled together from several monitoring services that don't talk to each other.

The problem

A US solar company had panels installed across a lot of sites, and each site reported into a different monitoring service - APsystems, SolarEdge, AlsoEnergy. To check how everything was running, someone had to log into each one separately. They don't show the same things either: one lists system size, another doesn't, the numbers and layouts don't line up.

There was no single place to see all the sites at once. They wanted one screen - an "Op Center" - for the whole fleet.

The approach

It started as a small fixed-price job from a freelance site. The spec came over email and got filled in as we went.

I pulled the data from each monitoring service's API into one dashboard. The annoying part is that none of them agree - different fields, different names for the same thing - so a lot of the work was just lining it all up into one consistent format. AlsoEnergy wanted a steep fee for API access, so we left that source out for the time being. Once it worked I put it on their own hosting, set up the database, tested it there, and walked the team through it.

The system built

• One dashboard - the "Op Center" - showing every solar site in a single view, with their logo in the header.
• Live data from more than one monitoring service (APsystems, SolarEdge), each with its own API, pulled into one format.
• A map layout with a marker per site. They started as solar-panel icons and became plain colored dots, colored by status, so the sites stayed readable zoomed out as the fleet grew.
• History per site.
• Multiple user logins, and written instructions for adding new sites and new monitoring sources later.

The outcome

It shipped, went onto their own hosting, and ran. The feedback was "been great to have it up and running... very nice work."

After that the same client came back twice more: once for a web-based sales platform and a database behind it, and later for a system to match solar "offerings" and "requirements" between developers, buyers, land and financing. One of those got dropped when they found an off-the-shelf tool that did most of it.

A small fixed-price job that turned into a couple of years of work. That's usually how it goes.