(C) 2015 Dickon Hood dickon@fluff.org
inverter is a trivial program to take the output of a SolaX (pron. 'Solar Ex', somewhat annoyingly) SL-TL 3600T solar PV inverter, and dump some data from it. It may work on other, similar devices; Suntellite and Solar River appear in the Google searches I've done.
As the amount of documentation on Internet about this datalogger is nill or less, I've had to reverse-engineer the protocol it uses. Happily, this is extremely simple in the normal case, as a quick perusal of the code will show.
It's intended to be a stage in a pipeline, consisting of a socket handler, it, and a grapher. It makes no attempt to log anything itself.
The SolaX inverters consist of two parts: the inverter, and a datalogger. It's the datalogger which spits out data, and has some limited configurability.
Don't expect to get anything out of it at night: the inverter is solar-powered, and takes nothing out of the grid. When it gets dark and the panels are unable to power the thing, it simply shuts down, hard.
The docs say it reports every 30 seconds. This is a lie. It's every 300s or so.
Thanks to https://github.com/Woutrrr/Omnik-Data-Logger/ I've managed to get data out of it on demand. There's a bizarre 16-byte string you need to send the logger each time you want data out of it, and in response it spits out the current state and a string to say it's done it.
make
There's now a Makefile.
$ ./inverter
(More usefully:
$ socat TCP4-LISTEN:10006,fork STDOUT | ./inverter | tee -a powerlog | ./log.pl
as it reads from stdin.)
As shipped, SolaX dataloggers' wifi interfaces start an access point, named 'AP$serialnumber'. If you connect to that AP, you'll be assigned a 10.* IP address. The DL will be at 10.10.100.254 -- login with admin/admin. Then change the password. Be aware that the thing's web interface will happily accept lengthy passwords, but it discards all but the first 15 characters. Attempting to login with anything bigger will fail.
You can (and probably should) configure its station mode to connect to your wifi network: I assume you know enough to do that yourself.
Under the Advanced options you'll see a bit about servers. Opening that tab gives a list of three, the top of which will be filled in with 'Default'. 'Default' is the details for solarmanpv.com; you can create an account on that site with your datalogger's serial number, and it'll draw you graphs.
I prefer to do this sort of thing myself, so under the second entry I've added my router's address, and told it to use UDP (hence the '-u' above).
Over the coming days I'll add a Perl script to log. For now, enjoy.
Output is something like this:
newdesktop:/home/dickon/src/inverter/ (0) 126 $ ./a.out < /tmp/pkt
Datalogger serial: 61xxxxx50
Inverter serial: S362xxxxxxx035
Temperature: 29.0 degrees Celsius
PV1 voltage: 146.0 V
PV2 voltage: 183.0 V
PV3 voltage: 0.0 V
PV1 current: 0.0 A
PV2 current: 0.0 A
PV3 current: 0.0 A
P1 voltage: 245.1 V
P2 voltage: 0.0 V
P3 voltage: 0.0 V
Frequency: 50.00 Hz
P1 power: 28 W
P2 power: 0 W
P3 power: 0 W
Today's total: 4.20 kWh
Total: 6.0 kWh
newdesktop:/home/dickon/src/inverter/ (0) 127 $
There's a new mode, where it'll poll for data. It's a bit buggy at present. Firstly, configure your inverter: login, and under 'Advanced', ensure 'Working mode' is set to 'Data collection'. Under 'Port setting', set the 'Internal server parameters' to Client, TCP, and the port number and IP address you wish to use. On your designated server, run:
$ while :; do ./inverter $serial -l 0.0.0.0 $port 1 ; sleep 1; done | tee -a newpowerlog | ./log.pl
(where $serial is the datalogger's serial number -- needed as part of the command string -- and $port is the port number you set above). ./log.pl assumes you have created an RRD database as described its comments. The tee isn't necessary, but it makes replaying all the values trivial, should you decide you don't need a 65GB RRD after all. You may want to trim that periodically if you do use it. The while loop is to catch it dropping connections.
It's a trivial loop. If it's no good for you, feel free to edit it.
I'm particularly looking out for details of the missing fields, and the fault condition flags.
The logger spits out two packet (no matter the transport): the first with a 103-byte payload, which is the interesting one, and one 53-byte payload, which contains the version, serial and MAC numbers of the logger. Most of the data seems to be unaligned 16b big-endian pairs.
Looking at a packet from my system, and correlating it with the data on Solarman, lead me to the following:
0x04->0x07 -- Datalogger's serial number backwards.
0x08->0x0b -- ditto (?)
0x11->0x25 -- Inverter's S/N
0x1f<<8 | 0x20 == 290 -- Temperature, d deg. C.
0x21<<8 | 0x22 == 1357 -- PV1 deciV?
0x23<<8 | 0x24 == 1678 -- PV2 deciV?
0x25<<8 | 0x26 == 0 -- PV3 (unattached) deciV?
0x27<<8 | 0x28 == 0 -- PV1 dA?
0x29<<8 | 0x2a == 0 -- PV2 dA?
0x2b<<8 | 0x2c == 0 -- PV3 dA?
0x2d<<8 | 0x2e == 1 -- AC dA?
0x2f<<8 | 0x30 == 0 -- P2 dA?
0x31<<8 | 0x32 == 0 -- P3 dA?
0x33<<8 | 0x34 == 2451 -- AC deciV?
0x35<<8 | 0x36 == 0 -- ditto, phase 2?
0x37<<8 | 0x38 == 0 -- ditto, phase 3?
0x39<<8 | 0x3a == 5000 -- centiHz?
0x3b<<8 | 0x3c == 28 -- AC W?
0x3d<<8 | 0x3e == 0 -- P2 W?
0x3f<<8 | 0x40 == 0 -- P3 W?
0x45<<8 | 0x46 == 420 -- Today's total, ckWh ?
0x49<<8 | 0x4a == 60 -- Total power output, dWh?
Yeah. There are.
The problem is, I've had to reverse engineer the packets, and some fields aren't clear to me. In particular, the logger is clearly capable of logging a three-phase inverter, and mine's only a domestic single-phase; I've had to guess at the meanings of an awful lot of zeroes. I also haven't made any headway on the fault conditions that are reportable -- my system currently trips its AC out some mornings, and these appear on Solarman's site -- but as I've no documentation to work from, I don't know what to look for.
GPLv2 preamble follows; the licence itself is in COPYING:
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.