Research solar power boat - data management and online visualization

The solar power boat of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, HTWG-Konstanz, University of Applied Sciences, Konstanz, Germany is driven by an electrical motor whose energy is solely provided by photovoltaic cells. Since long-time performance of photovoltaic cells and batteries in a marine application is unknown, an information-management-system (IMS) was developed to collect all relevant data from cells, batteries, motor and environment. Periodically the data is sent via internet to the main data store at the institute where it is processed and made available in a web page. Thus real-time data can be observed online as well as graphically displayed as a function of time. Communication on board is done via CAN-Bus. For the skipper, real-time data is also displayed in numeric and graphical form.