As somebody who remembers and had to work with OSI standard protocols by ISO, I’ve always related with this xkcd. There is a place for standards in physical things that need to work together, connectors etc. Same for regulated resources, such as radio frequencies. Anything in software is in my view better served by de facto standards.
For a very brief moment I considered turning my experience in home energy management into a business. Then I woke up and realised I’d be facing either house retrofitting or new build business, and all the companies involved in those. Nope.
I’m using the RPis in a few roles in relation to the solar panels. I collect daily solar production data from the inverter. The data is energy produced per hour. I also collect from Met Office model weather forecast data for our home location. This data is also per hour and I’m using 10+ parameters the forecast model provides. I learn every night a GP Regression model from the solar and weather forecast data. Learning every night ensures I always use the lates data available in the model. The GPR model allows me to estimate solar production tomorrow given a Met Office model forecast. I then use this estimate in various ways in decision-making, for example how much to use cheap electricity overnight to charge house and car batteries, i.e. how much headroom to leave in the batteries so that I’m unlikely to waste excess solar energy.
Here are the main components of my system, which has become a bit of a collection over the years:
Home Assistant on RPi
zwave USB stick
a number of lights, switches and multi sensors on the zwave network
A cluster of four RPis for various scheduled and transient tasks (data ETL, solar energy forecast model training and forecast generation, house battery and EV charge planning and execution, scraping and processing council bin collection schedule)
two RPis handling motorised curtains and cooling fans in home cinema
three ESP2866s running ESPHome controlling relays for switching sauna, floor heating and water immersion heating on/off
ten ESP32s running WLED controlling LED strips inside and out
Where is everybody? by Stephen Webb is a great read on the topic. It explains 50 solutions, some serious and others not so, to the Fermi paradox. My favourite is that the aliens are already here, and we just call them Hungarians.