Trying to understand the requirements for EG4(indoor) battery to talk to Home Assistant via MQTT

[dfw_dude]

So while I wait on all my goodies to arrive Wednesday, I dove back down the Solar Assistant rabbit hole. I realize the stock wifi dongle/app from EG4/Luxpower is much improved for the 6000XP inverter, but from my reading on here, I'd like to confirm something:

If I wanted to move the core monitoring functions to Home Assistant (running on my Synology), it sounds like I'll still need to purchase Solar Assistant and a pi so it would be the gateway into the inverter via MQTT? If this is true, does that also include battery monitoring/stats via wifi?

How I imagine the setup:
6000XP -> EG4 wifi dongle -> EG4's app for updates/firmware -> Solar Assistant via Wifi -> Home Assistant via MQTT from SA.

Originally I figured I'd be fine with using EG4's bundled app (it does look plenty robust), but since I like to tinker I know eventually I'll get bored and want to build a custom interface via Home Assistant for a nice tablet/stats setup on a cheapo Amazon fire tablet or something.

It sounds like with the stuff included with my 6000XP, all I really need to do is buy a Solar Assistant Pi bundle and I'd have everything I need.

 

[wpns]

Still waiting for my ship to come in, but if you are using the WiFi dongle apparently SA can connect directly over the LAN and you are done!

I’ll probably start out that way and switch to Ethernet and RS485 once things are stable.

 

[dfw_dude]

Still waiting for my ship to come in, but if you are using the WiFi dongle apparently SA can connect directly over the LAN and you are done!

I’ll probably start out that way and switch to Ethernet and RS485 once things are stable.

Nice - my freight shipment arrives tomorrow, so will probably order the SA bundle "just because" at this point $180 is nothing in the grand scheme of things. And yay federal rebate applying? hah

Normally I'm with you as my whole home is primarily 10gig hard wired, but the location of my battery/inverter setup is absolutely not ideal for wired, so I'm kinda glad the wireless access portion is the go-to for EG4 on the 6000xp. Will need to do some extra securing of their dongle I'm sure to make sure it's not accessible from outside, but that's easy enough.

 

[drps10]

Will need to do some extra securing of their dongle I'm sure to make sure it's not accessible from outside, but that's easy enough.

Can you explain for the non computer savy people? What makes it vulnerable and how do you lock it down?

 

[dfw_dude]

Can you explain for the non computer savy people? What makes it vulnerable and how do you lock it down?

change all default usernames/passwords, I don't have hands on the dongle adapter just yet, but it does have the ability to create it's own wifi bubble (which you then feed your own wifi info into)

security wise - instead of giving it full access to your home network you could restrict it as a guest device or vlan, and tunnel certain ports if you wanted it to have internet access for web based stuff.

More than likely I'd disable the dongles ability to communicate to anything outside of my house just because the data I'd want to see is only when I'm at home. I see little need for the ability to look at the system when I'm at work (at night funny enough) Could always temporarily enable net access if you knew a firmware update was available or something like that.

 

[shvm]

This is one such option.

GitHub - celsworth/lxp-bridge: A bridge to MQTT/InfluxDB/Postgres for communications with LuxPower inverters

A bridge to MQTT/InfluxDB/Postgres for communications with LuxPower inverters - celsworth/lxp-bridge

github.com

There are too many common things between 6000XP and LXP units.
I assume the WiFi dongle and its interface to be mostly identical.

I personally do not have an EG4 unit, but this can work with a bit of tinkering.