This project is about a Smart Nanogrid Testbed for exploring the performance and behaviour of Smart Nanogrids. This model consists of a hardware and a software part.

##Hardware The main part of the hardware are four Raspberry Pis. These mini computers are located in small 3D printed houses. Each Raspberry Pi has its own house which acts as a case at the same time. Each one of these represent a prosumer in the nanogrid as they consume energy as well as they feed in energy from their PVs.

###House model The model was designed with the 3D-drawing programm SketchUp from Google. The house is about 17 cm long, 15 cm high and 10 cm wide. In the inside of it there is a perfect shaped retainer for the Raspberry Pi. For this project there are some ports and a LC-Display necessary, because of this there is a big gap in the defined front side and some smaller gaps for USB ports, LAN and 3.5 mm jack. Two solar panels are located on the roof. Finally it was printed by a MakerBot Replicator Fifth Gen.

###Electronics Each house implements two solar panels, a circuit to emulate consumers and a battery backup. All houses are connected directly without any voltage conversion involved. Within the house voltage conversion is done to and from the predefined voltage which is on the main bus by DC/DC converters.

####PV Panels Two solar panels are in use. Each of them is 10 cm long and has a width of 8 cm. The highest power one can transform is one watt. To get the most power out of the PV panels, MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracking) is used to detect the sweet spot.

##Software To keep things simple and straight forward, the software is pure Java.

###Accessing the Hardware For accessing the GPIO on the Raspberry Pi, the pi4j project has been used. This library is based on the WiringPi project and offers almost all the features as the native library.

###Communication Communication has been done using the JAVA Agent DEvelopment Framework. JADE is a software Framework fully implemented in the Java language. Over JADE network the need energy for every house is determined.