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Solar Assistant Wish list, Bugs and Issues.

karnallie said:
I have to agree this is crucial. Mentioning the feature of "10 years of data with single inverter" using an 8Gb uSD card easily makes you think longevity of your data is not a concern, but with constant writing to SD cards being the only official implementation I highly doubt you would even get close to 10 years of data before the card fails...

I am waiting on my RS485 cable so that I can setup my SA installation, but now I am already concerned about when I will lose my data.
Even a manual "export my data" and "import my data" option will alleviate the concerns to an extent, but automated periodic backup to say Google Drive is a better long-term solution.
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+1
 
I am running a pair of the new EG4 6000EX units, and they only have a single MPPT. As such, I'd like the ability to suppress that throughout the entire SolarAssistant ecosystem. And in my case, having MPPT 2 in SAaallows discovery of a full set of related sensors into Home Assistant that will always have zero values.

Related, this system is off grid, so the ability to disable/hide everything related to grid power as well would clean things up quite a bit in both SolarAsisstant and Home Assistant.
 
Quattrohead said:
Can't get Pi's until next year. Anyone running something similar on a PC or ESP8266/ESP32 type device.
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I recently ordered an Orange Pi 3 and it seems like a direct clone of RPis. I literally took my pi3 card out and plugged it into the Orange Pi and it booted right up. Took about 2 weeks to arrive, $40 shipped:


if I get another one it'll be a pi4. The 3s are just a bit underpowered.
 
Anyone able to get bms data from SA into home assistant via mqtt? I have a 4 unit battery pack and only battery pack #1 is reporting data. The rest say "unknown" and pack 4 isn't even listed.

1664573227219.png
1664573269953.png
 
crazydane said:
I don't see why HA would not be able to change inverter modes, but I'm not aware of any of the inverter integrations supporting that at this time. I primarily use HA to just monitor what's going on. My inverters are grid tied and after the initial configuration, I have not had a need to go into them to change anything. But I don't have batteries in the mix and I see that Solar Assistant has extensive support for that and also insight into BMCs, etc.

I haven't really noticed any reliability issues with the Energy dashboard, but then I have only really been using it for the last month or so. Here's what mine looks like:

View attachment 110432

I really like the ability to monitor individual devices as well:

View attachment 110433

But I track my main inverter stats in Grafana:

View attachment 110434

And also what's going on with power in general:

View attachment 110435

View attachment 110436

And I really like the sensor value templates to do math on sensor readings:

View attachment 110437

But there's a LOT of manual configuration involved to get HA setup, so I definitely see how Solar Assistant would be a lot more user friendly in that regard. It doesn't look like there's a ready made Integration in HA for Solar Assistant, so what's the method used to pull data from it into HA?

Can I run Solar Assistant in a VM, or only on a Pi?
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Really nice job bud! I really need to spend some quality time with Grafana. It's slick. I tried getting it installed on my home assistant instance (supervised) on Docker a few yrs ago and was unsuccessful. I bet it's a lot easier now.
 
another note about solar assistant. when using the Narada BMS, Solar Assistant only recommends setting the "Read current from" option to inverter when only the master battery is readable.
1664841533523.png

I've noticed though that on my EG4 LifePower4 48V 100Ah batteries the lowest charge/discharge value they will report is about 100 watts. in my case with 12 batteries, that means the batteries could be charging/discharging about 1,200 watts in sum before the batteries even report anything when polled by SA.

so I've changed my setting to read from the inverters, and can read therefore all the way down to 0 watts (obviously according to the inverters), which makes all of the charts, graphs, and charging estimates more accurate.

here's a sample cleaned up screenshot showing where the inverters reporting 903 watts being pulled from the batteries, but all 12 batteries reported 0 watts being drawn.

1664842008523.png

I guess this request is to update the help text surrounding that setting. I can't report on how other batteries report their data, but the EG4 LifePower4 batteries definitely have a lower limit that they will report, and the recommended setting will get you much less data when you are in a low charge/discharge situation. For me, that's currently 12 hours a day, which is a little before sunset to a little after sunrise.
 
Jazzmonger said:
Anyone able to get bms data from SA into home assistant via mqtt? I have a 4 unit battery pack and only battery pack #1 is reporting data. The rest say "unknown" and pack 4 isn't even listed.

View attachment 114299
View attachment 114300
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yes I am getting my 6 eg4 batts info into HA from SA using mqtt.
seem to be getting voltage, min cell vots, max cell volts, avg volts and temps I think thats it

what I need is the SOC of the batts as shown in SA, and tyhe rate of charge/discharge percentage would be great
 
make sure your battery IDs start with 2, and not zero. if you started with zero, SA would only see battery #2 and #3.

also, if you got SA up and running on one battery as a test, then got everything else up and running, you need to have home assistant rediscover everything. so stop mqtt in SA, then enable the discovery, then start mqtt in SA. then go into home assistant, find your mqtt solar assistant integration, configure, reiconfigure mqtt, next, then make sure the enable discovery option and finish.

each time I make any hardware additions to the system, I have to run through these steps. maybe in your case, it's just that HA needs some sort of refresh on the data it can get from SA.
 
thanhrodke said:
make sure your battery IDs start with 2, and not zero. if you started with zero, SA would only see battery #2 and #3.

also, if you got SA up and running on one battery as a test, then got everything else up and running, you need to have home assistant rediscover everything. so stop mqtt in SA, then enable the discovery, then start mqtt in SA. then go into home assistant, find your mqtt solar assistant integration, configure, reiconfigure mqtt, next, then make sure the enable discovery option and finish.

each time I make any hardware additions to the system, I have to run through these steps. maybe in your case, it's just that HA needs some sort of refresh on the data it can get from SA.
Click to expand...
I started with battery ID 1 and SA sees all 4 batteries and all of their params. It's just the mqtt data in home assistant that isnit flowing from sa to home assistant for batteries 2,3 &4. Home assistant has each battery listed, just no data "unknown" for each attribute. I tried your steps but I still only see data on battery 1.
 
shotgun approach and uninstall mqtt from HA and set it back up again from scratch?

it's basically the exact same steps as you just went through here.
 
Out of curiosity has anyone else had issues with it rebooting after a software update?
After the last two updates it just hung there. I waited for 15 minutes trying to reach the local IP and then gave up and unplugged the unit and it reset just fine. My only worry is that unplugging is what lead to my database getting corrupted before.
It's not a major issue but I am wondering if it's my Pi3B or WiFi is the problem.
 
robby said:
Out of curiosity has anyone else had issues with it rebooting after a software update?
After the last two updates it just hung there. I waited for 15 minutes trying to reach the local IP and then gave up and unplugged the unit and it reset just fine. My only worry is that unplugging is what lead to my database getting corrupted before.
It's not a major issue but I am wondering if it's my Pi3B or WiFi is the problem.
Click to expand...
Yes had it once and found out it was the power supply.
Changed it and never happened again.
 
robby said:
Out of curiosity has anyone else had issues with it rebooting after a software update?
After the last two updates it just hung there. I waited for 15 minutes trying to reach the local IP and then gave up and unplugged the unit and it reset just fine. My only worry is that unplugging is what lead to my database getting corrupted before.
It's not a major issue but I am wondering if it's my Pi3B or WiFi is the problem.
Click to expand...
I als had a bad PS. Very strange things would happen. I ended up getting a 48v dc powered 5v supply to solve it.
 
wattmatters said:
I wonder if it's the power supply to the Pi's power supply that causes the grief?
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It did with mine. The one that came with my Pi worked perfectly for about a month and then all sorts of weird stuff started to happen.
Most of the time it would lose connection to the WiFi.
It was driving me crazy because I tried a Power Supply from an iPad and it was still doing the same thing. A few weeks later I was about to give up on SA but decided to try another PS and that one worked perfectly.
 
wattmatters said:
What I mean is I wonder if the issue is the power being supplied to the input of the Pi's power supply, not the Pi's power supply itself but the quality of upstream source of power.
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I kind of doubt it but who knows.
These things are built to a really low price so the PS could be sensitive to any weirdness in the AC.
God knows I miss linear power supplies. They are energy hogs but the good ones lasted for 20-30 years.
 
Does anyone know why it is only the Orange Pi that can output the Solar Assistant Screen over HDMI?
 
robby said:
No I mean you can see the same data that you see when you are on a web browser.

Go to the 11:30 Mark.
Click to expand...
Mine works fine on al older Pi 4, so definitely not an orange thing. Maybe it was something they recently enabled?

I am part of the early release program, and just recently upgraded to version 2022-10-30, but local access was available in the previous version as well.

1668205882847.png
 
thanhrodke said:
Mine works fine on al older Pi 4, so definitely not an orange thing. Maybe it was something they recently enabled?

I am part of the early release program, and just recently upgraded to version 2022-10-30, but local access was available in the previous version as well.
Click to expand...
Ah that explains it. They made it sound like it was a feature only available with the Orange Pi.
Thanks.
 
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