Openhab Solar Monitor

[dijit]

I really appreciate your reply. Reading my post again I didn’t do a great job of conveying my situation and thoughts on this. Thanks for ‘hanging in there’ with me, as I am better at doing things than explaining things…lol.

Maybe I can try again with more detail?

I have an off-grid solar setup:

Solar panels ----> Charge Controller -----> Battery Bank -----> DC loads/devices/etc.

I searched but did not find an existing hardware device with a binding that could provide data from my setup (data metrics listed in original post). The closest I could find was this recent post:

Ginlong Solis solar inverter monitoring

Just had solar installed, using a Solis-mini-4G grid tie inverter. Rather than using something like openenergymonitor, I wanted to use the supplied (well, optional) monitoring stick for the inverter. Normally this would go to their own portal, but it also has an option to point to another IP. I’ve managed to reverse engineer the protocol and written a script to process it and pipe it into MQTT, so that OpenHAB can monitor it. github repo: A bit of a write up about it, with more details. …

That post deals with a grid-tied solar setup using AC micro-inverters. It also details how the OP reverse engineered the protocol to adapt the hardware device to integrate with openHAB.

The post references openenergymonitor, which is another great project, but is also designed to monitor AC voltages.Going further down the rabbit hole, there is a forum member at openenergymonitor that built their own PCB to monitor their DC solar setup with openenergymonitor. There is an exisitng binding for openHAB, but I would need to build this DIY hardware device to go between the charge controller and openHAB. Their custom PCB was also designed for their specific situation, which happens to be a 48V setup, so I would need to adapt it to my system voltage. I realize that this is the nature of “DIY” but I also think that there is a better way.

Using the existing binding I would need the following hardware:
Solar Setup---->DIY PCB----->openenergymonitor----->openHAB binding

I’d really just like an off-the-shelf solar charge controller to report data to openHAB, as directly as possible.
Solar Setup------>openHAB binding

So, I ended up “making” one by modifying an existing controller and writing new software. It is a solar charge controller that can be used with 12/24/48/96V DC setups and has ethernet. I think I am about 75% on building the binding, but I am still new to this aspect. I could also implement MQTT without too much re-configuring, which is part of the reason I stopped to get feedback.

I’ve been singing openHAB’s praises since I stumbled across it. I have also been cobbling together home automation setups for years, and openHAB is the best thing that has happened to home automation since it’s inception.

I just wish that more hardware currently on the market was easier to integrate. In my opinion, end-users should not have to reverse engineer protocols, even if it is sometimes fun to do!

I’ve also attempted to build other hardware for collecting data in openHAB, but I continue to run into problems/limitations with the hardware.

All I want for Christmas is hardware that is as amazing as the openHAB software!

If you still happen to be reading this long post, thank you again, and let me know if you still think MQTT is easier to implement (considering the work I’ve already done on the binding approach).