OpenEVSE solar divert with new ESP32 beta

I’ve successfully built my OpenEVSE kit which uses the new Beta for the ESP32.

Thanks to Glyn for help and advice whilst building it, and for the sterling firmware efforts to make the ESP32 version available.

My EV has arrived, and I am charging it with the OpenEVSE :grin:

So this post is feedback for the new Beta Wifi firmware 3.0.3, as well as an ask for help to get the Eco solar divert mode working.

I can report that I can charge fine with manual start and pause, setting current limit works fine, and using the timer for night time charging also works fine. I typically set the car to limit to 80% overnight, which leaves some spare capacity in case it is sunny whilst the car is outside during the day.

I have configured inputs and feeds to Emoncms and OpenEVSE is successfully posting to the inputs and the feeds look ok.

I have set up the Base Topic and Grid (+I/-E) topic as emonpi/power1 , and OpenEVSE reports connected:yes.

However, I cannot get the Eco solar divert to work, it never turns the charger on.(I set the car’s own limit back up to 100% so it will take charge). So I have been manually modulating the charge by adjusting the current limit in OpenEVSE whilst watching my solar app in EmonCMS. This works, but quite a faff!

I note that the charge mode status on OpenEVSE always reports Grid Import/Export as 0W, with a time in red since last reboot - so I suspect OpenEVSE is not getting the grid import/export feed. Mostly likely something I havn’t got set quite right.

Here is the OpenEVSE status screen with Eco mode selected, note the 0W Grid Import/Export:

Here is the Services tab showing how I have set up the MQTT stuff. The Solar PV divert status says connected:yes, so I guess I have my EmonPi password correct, when I had it wrong it said connected:no. Have I got this configured correctly?

Here are the EmonCMS inputs. You can see that the inputs from the OpenEVSE are updating ok, and also the emonpi/power1 input is updating, which is what I thought I had connected OpenEVSE to:

And finally here is the EmonCMS feed view. Seems to be working, you can ignore the non-working KW feed, which is just me experimenting with stuff:

So any suggestions where I have got it wrong gratefully received, if you need more info from my end I’m happy to delve into whatever logs might help.

Thanks,

Pete

Does the deafening silence mean that nobody else has solar divert working with the ESP32 in the OpenEVSE?

That’s possible, as it is beta. It might also mean that @glyn.hudson as been too busy to visit the forum.

Hi Peter,

The MQTT topics on the emonpi are prefixed with emon therfore if emonPi Power 1 is your grid import export feed than you need to enter emon/emonpi/power1 as the MQTT Grid Topic in the OpenEVSE MQTT config.

When configured correctly you should see the grid import/export figure being updated every 10s or so on the OpenEVSE UI front page.

There should be nothing different about the Solar PV divert on the ESP32, there have been no changes to the SolarPV divert / Eco Charge algorithm compared to the ESP8266 version.

Thanks Glyn, that has sorted it - the Grid Import/Export figure on the OpenEVSE web page now matches the figure on the Solar app on EmonCMS.

All I need now is some sunshine to test the PV divert mode. :smiley:

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