Roadmap ahead

Yes, we have been a very busy lately, growing the team to handle the number of initiatives that are underway, some are chronological and others sequential.

Remote access with Cumulus

This central system can monitor 1000's of batteries for either a individual commercial customer to monitor and manage their fleet of battery sites, or a DIY battery builder to monitor their single or handful of projects remotely.

The initial consumer app is so that you can use a mobile/tablet/web browser to access your batteries remotely. It does not replace the technician toolkit that will be done at a later stage...

This project is split up into 5 key stages

  1. prototyping and evaluation with a small alpha group
  2. release of the display only consumer app
  3. fleet monitoring of multiple site with manage by exception tools
  4. enabling remote configuration functionality via technician tools
  5. proactive detect issues and alert users for them to investigate

 

Mini display with M5Stack

Revisit the preliminary prototype so that this can be adopted by others. The existing prototype could not be easily released due to the lack on buttons to join a WiFi network and connect to the Watchmon system. However we have a plan to fix this that will take some work and then we can publish this for all to embrace if they wish.

 

Inverter Integration

There are a number of new inverters/chargers available with suitable documentation that we can now look to prepare suitable protocol profiles for integration.

 

Support documentation and videos

We have actively split the support documentation from the main website. The improvements are ongoing as we revisit many of the existing articles and optimise them to be easier to find and search whilst also making them less confusing.

We have a number of new diagrams underway that outline the wiring of the system for various scenarios. All made easier with a graphic designer as part of the team.

Bruno is also busy with a list of videos to cover the steps by steps.

 

Watchmon Plus

Beyond the first release of Watchmon5 there are 2 additional variants being developed to handle multiple paralleled strings of batteries. Plus a 24v version suitable for those that only need 6 to 10 cells in series are on track for first beta projects later this year.

 

Watchmon Elite

WatchMon6 is definitely delayed (sorry), the existing evaluation modules, which we have put a lot of work and refinements into, are not quite good enough to be a step above the WatchmonPlus and the BMS will not do what we want, so it can sit on the bench top until it stops misbehaving.

We are rethinking the approach, and perhaps will come at it from a different angle before it is released. Hopefully in 2020 we can revisit this initiative after resolve the remote access initiative.