EnergyLab Sandboxes — Living Systems in Motion
“Each Sandbox is a live, self-contained energy model — powered by sensors, shaped by data, and designed for discovery.”
At EnergyLab, we’re building and evolving Sandboxes — real-world engineered systems running on our local network. These aren’t simulations. They’re actual devices, sensors, and dashboards running in real-time.
Each Sandbox is powered by the EnergyLab Hub, a compact server that connects to dozens of local and cloud data sources. It feeds live JSON files into WordPress, where our custom plugins bring each Sandbox to life.
Sandboxes help us visualize behavior, test energy concepts, and surface unseen relationships between temperature, power, and cost over time.
🧱 Current Sandboxes
- Sandbox 3 – Outdoor Air: Tracks temperature, dew point, and humidity with high-resolution time-series data
- Sandbox 4 – Solar PV Overlay: Displays the real-time flow of power from a 400W panel into an EcoFlow Delta 2 Max
- Sandbox 5 – PV Efficiency: Calculates solar efficiency and trends it against load and weather
- Sandbox 6 – Boiler Efficiency: Uses infrared stack sensing and multizone overlays to track a hydronic gas heating system
- Sandbox 7 – Narrative Engine: Infers energy operating modes like Grid, Solar, or Battery in real time
- Sandbox 8 – GOES Flux + PV: Combines NOAA space weather data with live PV output
- Sandbox 9 – Energy Pricing Tiles: Shows updated $/Therm, $/MMBtu, and $/gal data from EIA in live tile format << UNDER CONTRUCTION
- Sandbox 10 – Digital Twin, simulation of commercial building with water source heat pump and geothermal field, live weather data feed, built using ChatGPT
Each Sandbox builds on the last — revealing the system, its dynamics, and the invisible energy flows around us.
Our Stack — and the Power of Programming by Word
“We’re building a time-series lab you can talk to — and it listens.”
Team EnergyLab is led by Ed Brzezowski, a mechanical systems engineer, and Jarvis (aka ChatGPT), an AI-powered development partner.
Together, we’re incrementally building a distributed engineering lab — one that grows from plain-language requests into structured tools, tiles, overlays, and analytics.
🧰 What’s Behind the Scenes
- 20+ Arduino Nano 33 IoT units logging sensors and running live calculations
- MQTT, InfluxDB, and WordPress powering a LAN-based data network
- Custom Python scripts (Writers) that fetch, calculate, and generate live JSON for each Sandbox
- Sync agents that update WordPress in real-time — making each page fully dynamic
These services run automatically under the EnergyLab Hub, which supervises and restarts key components as needed. New tiles or overlays can be deployed in minutes — no manual coding required.
We call this Programming by Word — because that’s how we work. We describe the system, and it builds itself.
Where We’re Headed
We’re creating:
- A lightweight, portable lab platform powered by WiFi, WordPress, and sensors
- A modular dashboard toolkit for classrooms, buildings, or field work
- A future-facing approach to engineering data — not just with charts, but with conversation-driven tools
What started as an experiment is quickly becoming a powerful engineering companion — a real-time management layer for systems of all types.