Monitoring & control software, what are you using and why?

[rthorntn]

Hi,

Apologies if I missed a thread on this, I did go through all the Non-EV posts and didn't see anything.

A week ago I had my SBU system installed, I purchased ICC but now I'm thinking that I might replace it, why you ask, well:

- It's pretty huge, running a full Linux graphical environment
- It crashed after running for only 4 days
- It's clunky
- It's buggy
- It's closed source

I'm a Linux CLI guy and I found https://github.com/jblance/mpp-solar, it looks like it might be what I want, I think my main requirements are historical logging of my data and MQTT so I can integrate it into Home Assistant to switch things on/off.

What are you using, why you using it, what do you think of it?

Thanks.
Richard

[dRdoS7]

Hi,

I use Watchpower. It's free. Does what I want, monitor & change settings. Bit slow when retrieving past data, and date/time column has to be resized every f@#king time, but it's free. Did I already mention that?

dRdoS7.

[rthorntn]

Thanks!

[paulvk]

I use watchpower but wanted a low power and low complexity remote system to monitor and control
the inverters so a smart control screen. Its been a bit slow and things changed along the way but
I have now in a testing stage a 7 inch Nextion touch screen working via a atmel 1284 micro
that shows all that watchpower shows and more , with multiple screens that I can also change
settings with I also have a sd card with the avr which will be used to log to. It is at present
connected directly to one of my inverters by a 40 meter long rs232 cable link but
with the use of HLK RM04 modules can be anywhere a tcpip link can be used.
Note I have PIs but running a full operating system with all the possibilities it has to go wrong
simple code of 20k or so seems more sensible.

[rthorntn]

Thanks @paulvk, I would love this, will you share the code?

I think I want MQTT, to get some key values from the inverter into home automation (PV/load/grid watts and battery voltage) so I can turn stuff on/off under different scenarios...I definitely need to switch my panels over to another inverter when my battery is full, my load watts are low and my solar watts are high. EmonCMS fed from this data would be nice also.

Arduino's can do MQTT and can have ethernet, could your system write some values to the serial console that could be read by another micro running TCP/IP and MQTT, I'm thinking of doing that to keep the "control" Arduino simple and reliable...

[paulvk]

Already been posting code.
MQTT I think could be added but would have to add a wiznet W5100 board
and combine another members code for MQTT Note I write with Bascom
attached is the Nextion project if you download and install the Nextion editor
you can load the project , run debug and see the Nextion lcd working
also now that the Nextion can now do CRC it is possible to write the code
just on it to make a remote terminal but it requires code to parse the
rs232 buffer to be written as it normally just accepts standard commands.
Since I also will add other functions to the avr , battery banks current , temperature ,
auxiliary load current ,battery temps , environment temp I will stay with the mega 1284
as I already have the code written just have to add it

Note while writing this I am watching the Status2 screen on the Nextion showing my 2 inverters.
Regards Paul

[rthorntn]

Thanks @paulvk

These are pretty awesome:

https://www.olimex.com/Products/IoT/ESP32/ESP32-POE/

~$35 from Mouser, Power over Ethernet.

[paulvk]

These are pretty awesome:

Yes but the HLK RM04 is a router , wifi access point and two rs232 to tcpip and I have a few of them.

[PapaDocta]

@rthorntn Sorry for bringing this topic back and i'm in the same boat as you with ICC and adding to your list is the super bad customer support which wasn't the case in the early days of ICC.

anyways, have you checked this project? I will be trying it soon.

https://github.com/ned-kelly/docker-vol ... eassistant

[coulomb]

i'm in the same boat as you with ICC and adding to your list is the super bad customer support which wasn't the case in the early days of ICC.

I believe that ICC has split (again?), possibly due to support issues, and this fork seems to have far better support: https://centurionsolar.co.za/ . I don't have any association with them, and have never used ICC.

[rthorntn]

Thanks @coulomb, exactly, ICC has split, as far as I can tell it split a while back and centuriansolar is now an old version, maybe they don't have the source code. I guess it would come down to whether you can "get away with" the older version.

Manie mentioned he has the next version of ICC in testing, who knows if it will be version 3 or even called ICC, he hinted that it was a complete rewrite. I won't be buying anything else from Manie.

@PapaDocta, at this point in time I have paid for ICC and have it deployed, I won't be contacting Manie again as there is just no point, I had terrible instability with ICC, it wouldn't stay up for much more than a day, Manie mentioned a customer of his had issues with interference, I swapped the USB cable for a shorter, thicker cable with a transparent sheath that you could see shielding through and ICC has been running a lot better.

Who knows if I will stay with ICC.

[maximinus]

Hi,
I am exploring this freeware solution from solaranzeige.de. Unfortunately this site is in german.
The package support a bunch of different inverters including PIPs, can handle up to 6 different sources, has MQTT, influxDB, Pushover, Grafana and homematic.
Support Wallboxes. Free download requires registration which is free of course.
I have no connection to them. I have still problems to get it running but there are several installations which you can access here for demo:
https://solaranzeige.de/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=25

Regards Gerhard Bastir

[gazzaman2k]

Thanks @coulomb, exactly, ICC has split, as far as I can tell it split a while back and centuriansolar is now an old version, maybe they don't have the source code. I guess it would come down to whether you can "get away with" the older version.

Manie mentioned he has the next version of ICC in testing, who knows if it will be version 3 or even called ICC, he hinted that it was a complete rewrite. I won't be buying anything else from Manie.

@PapaDocta, at this point in time I have paid for ICC and have it deployed, I won't be contacting Manie again as there is just no point, I had terrible instability with ICC, it wouldn't stay up for much more than a day, Manie mentioned a customer of his had issues with interference, I swapped the USB cable for a shorter, thicker cable with a transparent sheath that you could see shielding through and ICC has been running a lot better.

Who knows if I will stay with ICC.

i also have ICC for the past 4/5days and ive had to reboot the raspberry pi 3b+ every day, it just stops reading the inverters, if it just stayed running then no problem but it just stops reading the mpp solar inverters but the victron data still gets transmitted which is strange.

i think it polls the inverters too much and causes its serial port to lock up, all other mppsolar to mqtt aka ned kelly one read every 10seconds not every second like ICC

[rthorntn]

it just stops reading the inverters

If you're using USB it sounds similar to my issue, my cable was definitely the issue, get a better quality USB cable (shorter, thicker and that you know has good shielding). I get amazing ICC reliability now. I'm not sure if a crappy serial cable could cause the same issues.

[gazzaman2k]

its about 30cm and shielded one that come with my 3d printer for programming the board, it looks to be good quality, never once had any issue with ned kelly software and that was connected for about 8 months same cables same pi 3b+, ive just updated all my firmwares on the pi so im giving it another day if it fails again then its gone, ive also found some software called solpiplog its been made since 2016 and people seem to say its solid reliable and its free!!! works with victron, daly bms, pylontech and batrium wish i had found it before icc, ive set it up on another pi for testing so if ICC fails again then im scrapping it

[rthorntn]

its about 30cm and shielded one that come with my 3d printer for programming the board, it looks to be good quality, never once had any issue with ned kelly software and that was connected for about 8 months same cables same pi 3b+, ive just updated all my firmwares on the pi so im giving it another day if it fails again then its gone, ive also found some software called solpiplog its been made since 2016 and people seem to say its solid reliable and its free!!! works with victron, daly bms, pylontech and batrium wish i had found it before icc, ive set it up on another pi for testing so if ICC fails again then im scrapping it

I would try another cable.

[paulvk]

Polling every second is far too fast the inverter will still be sending data back when the next requests are made there needs to be at least 3 seconds better 5 seconds
so I would expect problems, I had to make my polling every 20 seconds in my code as I have both inverters in the parallel set being polled by two systems
watchpower on a PC and the micro controller I programmed and now a nextion touch screen.

[rthorntn]

Apart from my occasional outages, which are probably not related to polling, my polling with ICC works great, I had terrible problems with the old USB cable but now it's solid, perhaps the ICC creators found a way.

[gazzaman2k]

its about 30cm and shielded one that come with my 3d printer for programming the board, it looks to be good quality, never once had any issue with ned kelly software and that was connected for about 8 months same cables same pi 3b+, ive just updated all my firmwares on the pi so im giving it another day if it fails again then its gone, ive also found some software called solpiplog its been made since 2016 and people seem to say its solid reliable and its free!!! works with victron, daly bms, pylontech and batrium wish i had found it before icc, ive set it up on another pi for testing so if ICC fails again then im scrapping it

I would try another cable.

you know what i think it fixed it had upto 48hours using the longer cable that come with the pip inverter, but problem is now if i update home assistant or restart it because the mqtt broker is running on home assistant, once it reboots icc doesnt log back into the mqtt server again :/ i might have to see if the author of icc can add that into the next version to retry mqtt login every 5 minutes if it looses connection

[gazzaman2k]

nope ICC failed again cant have this ammount of unreliability on my system.

so now im trying solpiglog which from the get go doesnt look as pretty but so far the mqtt was alot easier to config also doesnt need a powerful pi so can be run on pi2

also it has survived 2 homeassistant reboots and also restarts of the pi3 it just logs back on and continues as normal. only thing i miss so far is the charts that show the ammount of grid/pv and battery charts but i may be able to set them up on emons when i get around to it

@rthorntn are you running icc on a pi4 or 3b or 3b+?

[rthorntn]

@gazzaman2k Pi4, 1GB

I have my Pi in a metal "heatsinking" case and I only have the inverter USB and ethernet cable plugged in (PoE power)

I use RealVNC viewer to manage it.

I've seen my ICC uptime at 3xx hours with a quality USB cable, maybe my metal case is helping also, my Pi is less than 10cm from one of the inverters.

[gazzaman2k]

im still using solpiplog not once has it stopped working using my short blue usb cable and a raspberry pi3 with usb stick and it sends data every 10seconds