Sponge

Solar Device Monitoring Dashboard

Sponge, a renewable energy company, was building a home device to monitor solar output and usage but had no web development resources for the platform. Ollon built a React based web app with an Influx database backend, adapting the interface for both Raspberry Pi units and desktops. Sponge now has a production ready interface giving users clear visibility into their solar energy generation and usage.

Situation

Sponge, a company in the renewable energy sector, was developing a home device that monitors solar panel output and energy usage. While their internal team had strong hardware and solar expertise, they lacked the web development resources needed to create a user facing platform. Their goal was to build a user friendly website that could display real time and historical energy data, hosted on both Raspberry Pi units and desktop environments.

Solution

Ollon collaborated with Sponge’s hardware team to design and build a new React based web application. The team implemented a dynamic user interface that integrated with an Influx database to visualize energy usage and generation data. Key challenges included adapting the UI for Raspberry Pi deployment, handling a nonlinear and highly customized design, and ensuring seamless interaction between software and hardware components.

Results

Sponge gained a flexible, production ready interface that gave users clear visibility into their solar energy usage and generation. The solution bridged a critical gap in their offering, enabling them to deliver a complete hardware and software product. With the system in place, Sponge is equipped to support future deployments and refine the user experience as their platform evolves.

Technologies

ReactJS, Influx database,Raspberry Pi

Our Expertise in Action

Team augmentation and staff scaling

Sponge had strong hardware and solar expertise in house, but no web development resources for the customer facing side of its solar monitoring device. Ollon placed a developer with Sponge's team for the primary build between August and December 2023, then added a DevOps specialist that November as the project moved from active development toward cloud deployment. The team grew again for a maintenance phase running January through March 2024, when infrastructure work such as staging environments, certificates, and deployment pipelines needed attention. Staffing matched each stage of the work instead of holding a fixed team size through both the build and the deployment period.

IoT

Getting one dashboard codebase to run correctly on both a Raspberry Pi and a desktop browser meant handling two very different environments at once. Ollon split the application's functionality between the device and the web platform, then worked through the specific build issues that came up getting the React application to run properly on the Raspberry Pi hardware. Wifi connection setup was built directly into the dashboard, letting the device search for and join available networks without a separate configuration tool. That work let a single codebase serve both the embedded hardware and the standard web environment reliably.

UI/UX design and prototyping

Sponge wanted a nonlinear, highly customized dashboard layout for its solar monitoring device, not a layout pulled from a standard template. Ollon iterated on that design directly with the client, adjusting the settings page, login and account creation flows, and the overall visual style, including color scheme, icon set, and fonts, across a series of client meetings and feedback rounds. Custom SVG based diagrams were built to represent the device's data flow visually, requiring specific work to keep the diagrams aligned correctly as the screen size changed. The result was an interface built around Sponge's specific product, not a generic dashboard layout.

Data visualization

Homeowners using Sponge's solar monitoring device needed to see both real time and historical energy data at a glance, not just raw numbers. Ollon connected the platform to an InfluxDB time series database and built the graphs and dashboard views that displayed that data, refining the queries and chart formatting repeatedly to match the specific way Sponge wanted the information presented. Work included building a dedicated summary page graph and adjusting data queries as Sponge's specifications changed during development. The finished dashboard gave users a working view into their energy data pulled directly from the underlying time series store.

Energy

Sponge builds a home hardware device that monitors solar panel output and energy usage, but had no software layer to go with it, just the device itself. Ollon built the web application that turned that raw hardware data into something a homeowner could actually use, giving Sponge a complete product instead of hardware on its own. That gap mattered specifically in the renewable energy market, where a monitoring device with no way to view its own data isn't something a homeowner keeps using. With the software half in place, Sponge could sell a full hardware and software product rather than half of one.