Project · Tyndall National Institute

Watching a solar plant in real time

A fault-detection and monitoring dashboard for a photovoltaic installation, built during my Erasmus+ research placement at Ireland's Tyndall National Institute. Seven live measurement views over a single polled data service — the interface that made the research results usable by people who are not data scientists.

Role
Research engineer, solo build
When
Jan — Jul 2022
Stack
React, Chart.js, Tailwind, Node, MongoDB
Code
github.com/ozantahta

What it does

A photovoltaic array degrades quietly — shading, soiling, a failing bypass diode, a string dropped offline. The monitoring hardware records plenty; what it does not do is tell anyone which of those signals matters right now. This dashboard reads the plant's measurement series from a Node service backed by MongoDB, tracks the current clock position in the series, and redraws every chart as the day advances.

Each quantity gets its own route and its own view, so a researcher can go straight to the one they care about instead of hunting through a single crowded screen.

The seven views

  • PV array current — Ipv
  • PV array voltage — Vpv
  • Array power — Ppv
  • DC bus voltage — Vdc
  • Three-phase current
  • Three-phase voltage
  • Voltage & current frequency

How it fits together

01

Data service

A Node and MongoDB API exposing the plant's fault-detection series, reached over a single axios client.

02

Shared fetch context

One React context holds the series and the current time cursor, so every view reads the same data and advances together.

03

Chart layer

Line and bar components over Chart.js, routed per measurement with React Router and styled with Tailwind.

What a view looks like

Array current & voltage
DC bus voltage
Three-phase & frequency