Solar Assistant sadness

[SolarRich]

My laptop runs programs I wrote to access the systems in the house to store the data and make charts. The solar heat that is integrated into the house, solar hot water system, 2 inverters. Does not take very long to write programs to do these tasks since all the controllers and inverters are connected via ethernet or RS485.
We each have a solution that works for us. It's great to share how to do these things so others can find what works for them.

 

[timselectric]

I want plug and play.
I'm an old man who yells at technology, a lot. lol

 

[Quattrohead]

I want plug and play.
I'm an old man who yells at technology, a lot. lol

Me too and I used to be in IT.

 

[houseofancients]

Me too and I used to be in IT.

me too, am an it dude, just dont want to spend time on fiddling around.
my spare time is too presious

 

[steve34043]

I did write my own backup solution for Solar-Assistant. I back-up everything onto a USB stick every hour and keep 30 days worth of backup files of influxDB and grafana. If I ever had to rebuild the SD card I could restore the DB from the backup any time. I'm not trusting the SSD for any of it.

I also agree with @robby , most "updates" are to support new inverters and not to support existing ones. He did fix the MPPT3 reading for my Sol-Ark 15k, he also corrected the weekly sums that were out of whack eventually but my temperature reading for the inverter is still garbage, the grafana version is still a really old outdated one with limited abilities and there is still no built-in backup solution.

Overall I like Solar-Assistant, I don't care about the hardware locked license, he allows a single transfer to a new raspbery pi one time which should be enough if it ever dies and the package he sold works very well in general.

With the frequent writes and likelihood of the SD card dying the backup solution should be top priority for him to fix but I worked around it which works for me. If you're technically inclined I posted in another thread how to do it.

Greg, I don't have a working copy of Solar Assistant ... yet ..., but you seem a bit knowledgeable about it. Question: Since you can export the database for backup purposes, do you know if the data is easily usable? To clarify, I would like to access the data by a second routine to monitor battery parameters and feed to a control system. (i.e. Monitoring battery state of charge to close a relay, to "dump" power to a water heater. Thanks for any incite.)

 

[timselectric]

Greg, I don't have a working copy of Solar Assistant ... yet ..., but you seem a bit knowledgeable about it. Question: Since you can export the database for backup purposes, do you know if the data is easily usable? To clarify, I would like to access the data by a second routine to monitor battery parameters and feed to a control system. (i.e. Monitoring battery state of charge to close a relay, to "dump" power to a water heater. Thanks for any incite.)

Home Assistant is compatible for that.

 

[gazzaman2k]

why dont you just use a usb stick for solar assistant? everyone knows loads of writes kill sd cards, look at home assistant loads of complaints of dead cards.... its what happens when they are constantly being wirtten to.

 

[houseofancients]

why dont you just use a usb stick for solar assistant? everyone knows loads of writes kill sd cards, look at home assistant loads of complaints of dead cards.... its what happens when they are constantly being wirtten to.

because you cant ?

 

[gazzaman2k]

because you cant ?

what you on about lol i have a rasp pi 3b+, i used balena etcher write the image to the usb stick and stuck it in the pi and away it went....

 

[houseofancients]

what you on about lol i have a rasp pi 3b+, i used balena etcher write the image to the usb stick and stuck it in the pi and away it went....

tried that when i first got SA didnt work for me, could write image to usb and boot from it.
do have a pi 4

good to know that works now

 

[gazzaman2k]

tried that when i first got SA didnt work for me, could write image to usb and boot from it.
do have a pi 4

good to know that works now

you have to enable the pi 4 to boot from usb, you have to flash a new bootloader from raspberry pi for it to be enabled

 

[houseofancients]

you have to enable the pi 4 to boot from usb, you have to flash a new bootloader from raspberry pi for it to be enabled

running latest boot loader and usb boot is enabled by default in my settings.
but, this was when the pi4 hadnt been released that long..
might have been an early quirk

 

[steve34043]

Home Assistant is compatible for that.

timselectric, Thank you. I will look into that.​

 

[Nobodybusiness]

spare time

What is this mysterious spare time?

 

[houseofancients]

What is this mysterious spare time?

that is becomming more mysterious every day indeed, which is why i want to spend it on other things

 

[Steve Fractals]

Looks like the kinda place that wrote a program on a computer once, enough to get it running for them, and then immediately tried to turn around and start selling that solution bundled with draconian hardware locked licensing. Since they were FAST to get EG4 battery support, I paid attention to them for about 5 minutes, but when I went to PAY THEM MONEY, and they wanted to play stupid games instead (hardware licensing), I went and found better solutions.

So what was your better solution as interested?

 

[SenileOldGit]

gazzaman2k, thanks for your posts, I didn't realise I could boot from a USB stick on a Raspberry Pi (though I've had computers since the ZX81, I only bought my first Raspberry Pi late last year, for Solar Assistant, and just followed the instructions and used an SD card). I didn't know SD cards didn't cope well with lots of writes. I think I'll get a cheap NVME SSD card (is that the correct terminology) and a USB enclosure for it, they're ridiculously cheap now, and use that with my Raspberry Pi.

 

[30362]

I did write my own backup solution for Solar-Assistant. I back-up everything onto a USB stick every hour and keep 30 days worth of backup files of influxDB and grafana. If I ever had to rebuild the SD card I could restore the DB from the backup any time. I'm not trusting the SSD for any of it.

@GregTR would you mind providing more detail on the SA access and backup solution you built. I currently have Influx and Grafana in a docker container configured to pull data from my Emporia Vue energy monitors, I'd like to be able to add the SA influx db as a data source for my current grafana instance so I can add SA data to my dashboards. And the influx db backup would be ideal as well. Thanks!

 

[GregTR]

PowerView Pro data download

I just got a Sol-Ark 15K installed and while I'm not hating the PoverView page (I am OK with my data being stored in China) I'm disappointed that I can't download the data. Is there a way to get the raw measurements back so I can correlate it with my Emporia measured values? Alternatively, can...

diysolarforum.com

You will need to get ssh/root access to the Raspberry Pi instance first before that USB backup solution can be applied.