Being an open-source based software company means to continuously being active and present in the community. Not only being there for customers, but also for “users” (in our case, other energy innovators who are interested in using FlexMeasures).
At FOSDEM 2024, there was an energy devroom again (2nd time). As we talked about using FlexMeasures in an open vehicle-to-grid (V2G) stack last time, we wanted to be a bit more hands-on this time. After all, FOSDEM is a developer conference.
So we designed a quick 15-minute tutorial which gives you a tour of how to integrate with FlexMeasures if you were to build your own smart heating startup (and use FlexMeasures as a smart backend). The video is right here, enjoy:
We covered these steps:
- create a new customer account with the relevant asset models for this use case (via a new API endpoint, e.g. called from your CRM)
- feed local measurements (e.g. temperature) regularly into your FlexMeasures server, using the FlexMeasures Python client
- get the latest price and weather forecast data from third-party-APIs (regularly via cron jobs), using existing FlexMeasures plugins
- call the FlexMeasures scheduler to compute when to draw green & cheap electricity for heating (via the FlexMeasures API) which you can put to use in the building
- define a cost reporter and let it run (regularly via cron jobs)
- configure a FlexMeasures dashboard to show the relevant data in one place
A lot for 15 minutes, and we didn’t even touch all possibilities. A big thank you to the volunteer staff at FOSDEM, who made sure you can re-watch this now.
If you have questions about these presented topics, do make sure to contact us.
