Solar Assistant vs. Home Assistant

[MaikaiLifeDIY]

Once you find the right RS485 adapter I'd like to see how your parse the data and pipe it direct into HA.

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shop.m5stack.com

 

[cmack]

Once you find the right RS485 adapter I'd like to see how your parse the data and pipe it direct into HA.

I think this comment is the real reason SA has value. Unless someone has already done this from Sol Ark into Home Assistant, it would likely be very time consuming / complicated to do.

I'm plugging this into the Pi today so SA can get more details about my batteries. I hope it's the right adapter :D

 

[Crowz]

Seeing how often it updates is actually easy.

These are three back to back entries from my solar assistance database. These are pulled directly from the database using :

select * from "PV power 1";

I plucked these three entries from list to test this.

[1697411579000000000,0]
[1697411588000000000,0]
[1697411598000000000,0]

These 3 entries translate to this :

Sun Oct 15 2023 18:12:59 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)

Sun Oct 15 2023 18:13:08 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)

Sun Oct 15 2023 18:13:18 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)

 

[cmack]

Seeing how often it updates is actually easy.

These are three back to back entries from my solar assistance database. These are pulled directly from the database using :

select * from "PV power 1";

I plucked these three entries from list to test this.

[1697411579000000000,0]
[1697411588000000000,0]
[1697411598000000000,0]

These 3 entries translate to this :

Sun Oct 15 2023 18:12:59 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)

Sun Oct 15 2023 18:13:08 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)

Sun Oct 15 2023 18:13:18 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)

Interesting! This will only tell us how often it's writing to disk though. We would need a different method to determine how often it's polling the inverter / updating the UI. If this is happening over a web socket we could monitor that?

Those timestamps are not exactly 10 seconds apart, I guess the charting library is configured to round them to the 10 second mark. This would mean the charts are not properly representing the data that's collected.

 

[Quattrohead]

Unless someone has already done this from Sol Ark into Home Assistant

Has already been done.

SA reads from my equipment every second and sends it out to HA via mqqt, you can see it. But SA updates its own user interface every 3-10 seconds depending on the Pi it's running on.

 

[marionw]

For me SA polls my 6 EG4 LifePower4 batteries every 15 seconds (each battery). How do I know? I created a splitter so I could listen/sniff the RS485 communications between SA and the batteries (I can also sniff between SA and the inverter). SA is getting most of the import data from the batteries but does nothing with some of what I consider important such as status of the Charge and Discharge MOSFETS or any alarm conditions. I have disconnected several batteries in the battery to battery communications and SA did not complain or let me know it was no longer receiving data from these batteries. I disconnected the RS485 link between the master battery and the inverter and SA did not show a BMS Fault alarm. Don't get me wrong SA is an adequate tool but I want more, hence I am writing my own. SA MQTT is limited in what it is sending to HA, how do I know, I wrote a program to subscribe to SA MQTT and display the data. I want to be able to get text or email notifications (audible or visual alarm) if there is a pending fault or fault. I want to be able to click on a battery overview display and get a drill down display that shows cell voltages etc. Work in progress but I am making progress, sometimes it is hard to decipher the Chinese in the various protocol technical documents I have but I will get there.

 

[robby]

This is a good point. Without this, you would need to give techs access to your SA dashboard, and they may not want to use a different interface to help diagnose problems. They would, however, have access to higher resolution data. Last I heard, they are targeting 30 second data points (big improvement over 5 minutes, but still nowhere close to live)

I don't think they would use SA to do Tech Support. They honestly do not trust SA for changing settings and SA can only change a limited amount of the settings and it cannot read 80% of the archived graph data.

As for update time, I have discussed this with them many times. I told them straight up that 30 seconds is not very useful, it needs to be realtime or at least within 10 seconds. I basically told them they need to make the dongle have a way to read the data from the local IP in realtime and then do 30 seconds for remote data logging.

I can tell you that their main issue with updates is that Sol-Ark tech support is complaining that the 5 minute wait time is making their service calls a lot longer. They need 30 seconds to make their service call times shorter.

 

[wattmatters]

If you don't like it, don't use it. Build your own if the specifications don't meet your needs. When I read the SA promo info I see nothing to say they claim data is logged every second.

As I said, via the MQTT interface you can log data as quickly as it comes in. e.g. here's my battery shunt data plotted with Grafana in HA, which comes via SA MQTT. Data is logged at short intervals (no shorter than one second) but can be longer as the data is only updated when the value itself changes. For this my system resides on a virtual machine on a PC with far greater processing capacity and better, more reliable storage than an SD card can ever provide, plus automated backups.



This is data captured by InfluxDB. Again, values are updated when they change. A one second interval:

 

[wattmatters]

SA MQTT is limited in what it is sending to HA, how do I know, I wrote a program to subscribe to SA MQTT and display the data.

MQTT Explorer would have done this for you.

 

[cmack]

If you don't like it, don't use it. Build your own if the specifications don't meet your needs. When I read the SA promo info I see nothing to say they claim data is logged every second.

Such a constructive response, thanks bud! I spent the money so I don't need to build it myself.

This is directly from their website, and it's the main reason I purchased the license.

 

[cmack]

For me SA polls my 6 EG4 LifePower4 batteries every 15 seconds

Is your battery connected to Solar Assistant logger AND to your inverter? I just tried that, but it didn't work (connection failed).

I am now reading that it may not be possible. Is anyone aware of a workaround?

 

[marionw]

It depends on the batteries as to whether SA and the inverter can talk to the battery stack at the same time. SOK and SunGoldPower rack batteries can do both as they have a dedicated RS485 (A) port specifically for inverter communications, and RS232 port for software (SA) monitoring and RS232(B &C) ports for battery to battery communications.

 

[wattmatters]

This is directly from their website, and it's the main reason I purchased the license.

That doesn't say data is logged every second but I can understand the confusion and your frustration at it not meeting your expectations.

Such a constructive response, thanks bud! I spent the money so I don't need to build it myself.

Send it back for a refund.

 

[cmack]

It depends on the batteries as to whether SA and the inverter can talk to the battery stack at the same time. SOK and SunGoldPower rack batteries can do both as they have a dedicated RS485 (A) port specifically for inverter communications, and RS232 port for software (SA) monitoring and RS232(B &C) ports for battery to battery communications.

I have a rack of Jakiper batteries, the manual is a little unclear how to set this up. When plugged into RS485A, I get "no response". With RS485B I get "invalid data".

According to the SA battery config page, I should be using "Jakiper RS485 port"

Any ideas based on this photo?

 

[cmack]

Send it back for a refund.

Might have to, although I'm in touch with them so I'll see if it's possible to add a user-defined setting to control logging interval.

 

[Mr.Hyde]

I think this comment is the real reason SA has value. Unless someone has already done this from Sol Ark into Home Assistant, it would likely be very time consuming / complicated to do.

I'm plugging this into the Pi today so SA can get more details about my batteries. I hope it's the right adapter :D

I'm not sure if I can post the link here, but this discussion over on powerforum.co.za has a lot of discussion on doing this (for Deye inverters, but hypothetically the RS485 is the same).

Either you have to pipe the RS485 directly into whatever you are running HA on, or use an ESPHome. I'm going to try the latter and have an ESPHome with an RS485 carrier ready (make sure you use the right RS485 chip for the 3.3V ESPHome).

Several people have created HA dashboards to ingest this data.

Like I said, this is all theoretical until my system is installed (power company signed off on permit, just waiting for town, then install can start), but I'll definitely post my experience.

 

[marionw]

They look very much like SOK and SunGoldPower batteries. The RS485A is for Inverter/BMS Communications. The RS485A on the Master battery is connected to the BMS Input on the Inverter. The RS232 (RJ12 jack) with an RS232-USB converter/cable will work with SA. The RS485B and RS485C ports are dedicated battery to battery communications ports. The RS232 port on the Master battery connects to SA or the battery monitoring software. Wonder if SOKTools.exe will work with these batteries.

If the BMS is the same as in the SOK and SunGoldPower rack batteries:
RS485A uses the Pylontec protocol. The RS232, RS485B and RS485C use the PACE protocol.

 

[marionw]

You can download the SOKTools software at SOKTools Software

This is the RS232 to USB Cable I use with SunGoldPower Batteries RS232-USB

 

[Grimmster]

How do you not have control over your data with Home Assistant? What are you referring to, specifically?

 

[cmack]

The RS232 (RJ12 jack) with an RS232-USB converter/cable will work with SA

Thanks! I will give this a shot, if all is good I'll pass along the info to SA to update their webpage.

How do you not have control over your data with Home Assistant? What are you referring to, specifically?

I think the thread title is confusing, sorry about that. I got control over my data by switching away from the default logger for my Sol Ark which is PV Pro. That system relies on an internet connection and stores data somewhere in China.