Solax monitor

[Beelbeebub]

I've hacked together a basic monitor for my SolaX (IES) inverter. 

 

The goal was a standalone display so we can see the battery status and also charge/discharge/imoort/export status of our system - primarily to make it easy to decide if there is surplus power to stick an extra wash on etc. 

 

Yes, you can get all this and more from your phone app, but you ha e to get your phone out plus this is entirely local and cloud independent, though it does use your home WiFi. 

 

Anyway, it's pretty basic for now. 

 

The hardware is a £60 "Presto" from pimoroni - essentially a hobby electronics board with a display. It's a microcontroller, so no issues with operating system updates, viruses etc.

 

There's no reason this couldn't be modified to work with other solax inverters or potentially other inverters. It's just a case of knowing what local call to make to the inverter to get it to spit out it's data and then how to parse that data. 

 

I'll tidy up the source code and put it on giyhub if there's interest. 

[S2D2]

I've done this with an x1 hybrid g4, in case anyone has questions about that.

 

You can pull data every 10s on the standard wifi dongle.

[Beelbeebub]

9 minutes ago, S2D2 said:

I've done this with an x1 hybrid g4, in case anyone has questions about that.

 

You can pull data every 10s on the standard wifi dongle.

Is that via the Web Api? I'm using thr local one and (as far as I can see) there is no rate limit, beyond simple network traffic, currently every 3 seconds with no problems

 

I did see the Web Api has a rate and daily limit. 

[MikeSharp01]

I did it with RPi Pico W talking to my Growatt. I send the data out as mqtt messages which I then read anywhere and log the data on a remote pc direct to mysql, the Pico is not great for logging.

[Beelbeebub]

24 minutes ago, MikeSharp01 said:

I did it with RPi Pico W talking to my Growatt. I send the data out as mqtt messages which I then read anywhere and log the data on a remote pc direct to mysql, the Pico is not great for logging.

This unit uses the newer (and more powerful) rp2350 chip, it's got an sd card if I wanted to log locally. 

 

I'm not bothered about local logging as the solax cloud does that and I can download that easily enough. 

 

This is more for a super simple, real time, low latency view of what's going on.  I can watch the sun go in and the power drop, whilst the cloud (ha!) can take 20.or 30 seconds to reflect that.

 

It a mainly for my wife so she can just look at it and then decide to put an extra load of washing on rather than ask me, who then checks my phone. She's not bothered about the minutie of data, just a "go/no go" display (it does put up a "surplus!" message if we hit our export limit - which often means we have significantly more power availible. 

[S2D2]

48 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

Is that via the Web Api? I'm using thr local one and (as far as I can see) there is no rate limit, beyond simple network traffic, currently every 3 seconds with no problems

 

I did see the Web Api has a rate and daily limit. 

Via local http. There's no explicit rate limit, 10s was good enough for me but even still, I have to disable it when Solax do remote updates as it does cause them to fail.