Simulate solar, battery, thermostat, and EV telemetry on demand, with no real hardware required.

Virtual Devices is a simulator built into the Texture dashboard that stands in for real hardware. It generates realistic, continuously updating telemetry for any device type under any conditions you choose, such as a battery in backup mode, a heat wave in Phoenix, or a fleet of 8 EVs charging overnight. Use it to test your integration, demo a scenario, or reproduce an edge case without waiting on real-world weather, hardware, or customer behavior.

Virtual Devices lives under Developer → Virtual Devices and has three tabs: Accounts (virtual OEM accounts used to test the Connect flow), Sites (each site runs a scenario that drives its telemetry), and Devices (the individual simulated inverters, batteries, thermostats, and EV chargers).

Devices don't play back pre-recorded data. Each site runs a seeded simulation of solar position, weather, building load, HVAC, and battery dispatch, all driven by the settings you choose. Change a setting and the simulated telemetry changes with it.

Step 1: Create a virtual account

Virtual devices belong to a virtual TextureOS OEM account. During testing, the Connect flow treats this account as your customer's account.

1. Open Virtual Devices. Go to Developer → Virtual Devices → Accounts.

2. Click Create Account.

3. Fill in the form. Enter a name, an email, and a password, and choose an Account Type. Default reuses your workspace's default virtual account; OAuth creates a new account with its own Connect-flow credentials, which is what you want for testing the Connect flow.

4. Click Create. Your new account appears in the list with a confirmation message.

Step 2: Create a virtual site

A site is where you pick a scenario preset, optionally adjust its settings, and create devices, all in one dialog.

1. Open the Sites tab and click Create Site.

2. Name the site. Choose something that describes what you're testing.

3. Pick a preset. This is the biggest decision in the form. Each preset is a realistic combination of device roles (solar, battery, HVAC, EV, EV charger) and baseline settings. The description and role badges show what it simulates before you change anything. See the preset list below.

4. Set reproducibility and location (optional). A fixed Seed replays the exact same noise pattern every time, and Start can be back-dated to simulate a past window instead of "now." Location (search for an address) and Timezone feed the solar-position and weather model directly, so they affect the results. Both default to the preset's location if you leave them blank.

5. Adjust parameters (optional). See Step 4.

6. Create devices (optional). At the bottom of the dialog, choose the account the devices should belong to and check the roles that should get a real device record on this site. You can also skip this and attach existing devices later.

7. Click Create.

Step 3: Add devices to a site

You can create devices while you create the site (the optional Create devices section in Step 2), or add them later from the Devices tab.

1. Open the Devices tab and click Create Device.

2. Choose an account. This is the virtual account the device belongs to.

3. Choose a site. Every device belongs to a site, and the site's scenario sets what the device simulates. If your workspace has no virtual sites yet, the dialog prompts you to create one first, with a Go to Sites button.

4. Choose a device type. Options are Battery, Charger, Thermostat, Vehicle, and Inverter.

5. Click Create.

Step 4: Override scenario settings

Below the location fields, a collapsed Parameters panel lets you customize the preset. You don't need to write any code or JSON.

1. Expand Parameters. Settings are grouped into Environment, Site, Load, and one section for each role the preset includes (Solar, Battery, HVAC, EV, EVSE). Each field shows a plain-language label, unit, and description.

2. Expand a section to see each field's current value (the preset default unless you've changed it).

3. Click Override next to the field you want to change.

4. Set your value. The control fits the field: percentages use a slider, choices such as battery mode use a menu with readable labels ("Self-consumption (use solar first)"), and optional limits such as the grid charge window or forced rate offer three choices: Use preset default, No limit, or Set a value.

5. Reset if needed. Click Reset on a field to return to the preset default.

Section headers show a count badge (for example, "2 overridden"), and the Parameters panel shows the total, so you can see what you've customized without opening every section.

Step 5: Review the simulation

After you create the site, its detail page shows the resolved scenario (preset, seed, start time, timezone, location, and any overrides) followed by a Simulation preview.

• Pick a time window. Choose Next 24h, Last 24h, Last 7 days, First 48h, or a shorter recent window of 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour.

• Read the charts. Site power shows Grid, Load, Solar, Battery (positive when discharging), and HVAC, and a separate chart shows battery state of charge over time.

• Check the devices. The Devices list shows each simulated device and the role it fills (inverter → solar, battery → battery, thermostat → hvac).

• Script events. Use the Timeline to add discrete events, such as an outage, a state-of-charge jump, or an API error, on top of the continuous simulation. This tests how your integration reacts to edge cases, not just steady-state telemetry.

Scenario presets

Each preset is a starting point. Pick the one closest to what you want to test, then override only the few settings that matter.

Residential

Commercial

Using the API

Everything in the dashboard is also available through the Texture API, so you can set up virtual accounts, sites, and devices from your own test scripts. Requests go to https://api.texturehq.com/v1 and are authenticated with your API key in a Texture-Api-Key header. See the API reference for full request and response details.

A typical flow

• Find a preset. Call GET /virtual/scenarios and pick a preset ID, such as outage-drill.

• Create a site. Call POST /virtual/sites with the preset ID and any overrides. You can create devices in the same call.

• Connect devices. Devices created through the API are registered on the platform with POST /virtual/devices/{id}/connect, after which they appear as connected devices (GET /v1/devices/{id}). Devices on an OAuth account go through the Connect flow instead.

• Script edge cases. Add events with POST /virtual/sites/{id}/events. Event types are offline, comms_dropout, api_error, outage, set_soc, unplug, plug_in, charge_stall, trip, set_param, and command_failure. Times can be an ISO timestamp or an offset from the site's start, such as +PT6H.

• Check the results. Read the simulated series with GET /virtual/sites/{id}/timeseries, or a single device's state with GET /virtual/devices/{id}/state.

Accounts

Scenarios

Sites

Timeline events

Devices

Good to know

• Same seed, same results. A fixed seed with the same settings always produces the same curves, which makes tests repeatable.

• Location matters. Location and timezone drive the solar and weather models, so change them to match the region you want to simulate.

• Start from a preset. Override a handful of settings rather than building a scenario from scratch.

• Devices are optional at creation. You can create a site first and add devices to it later from the Devices tab (Step 3).