SMA Solar PV Inverters - monitoring over bluetooth

Yes the reading do appear to be very stable, cant work out the string DC currents thou?
I don’t know how relevant is is but its taken out the underscore for the inverter name.

Regards
Dave

I strip all non alpha/digit characters out of the inverter names so emonCMS is happy.

I’ve got some different logic for reading the DC strings which should help @Steve get his system working properly.

I’ve pushed up a new version of the emonHub code which better handles the communications with the inverter and should also read the DC values correctly.

I won’t cater for multiple inverters - thats next on the list!

I hope to give this a go this weekend.

We have a little issue with our pair of inverters where they seem to ratchet up the AC voltage resulting in > 260v then one cuts out. Any suggestions for monitoring this & alerting if it happens? I was thinking of copying the feed off to somewhere else (edit the node red logic?) then writing a little Azure daemon app to check ping me when it happens.

I (did) output the AC Voltage of the inverter - although just dropped this out as it didn’t seem very useful.

Easy to add back in if it is.

Actually yes that would be neat as I could compare it to the AC reading of my emonTx near the consumer unit.

The solar inverters will “push” up the voltage when they export/generate power - I see it as well, but not as high as you get.

Is the inverter set to the correct region setting/standard?

I’ve had a go at running this, using the guide you wrote above, but with limited success.

The hcitool sees all 5 inverters, but emonhub gives ‘Wrong Level 2 packet returned’ error.

Hi Bill, yes there is a problem at the moment with more than 1 inverter.

I’ve uploaded new code to my github area which helps, but only looks at 1 inverter at the moment.

Can you tell me more about your setup - 5 inverters is quite unusual !!

Latest pull request from @stuart has now been merged into emonHub, sorry this took so long:

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Hi Stuart’s, I’m finally getting ready to try this, only thing is that I got two inverters. Any chance it will work with two inverters or is it better that I wait for an updated version?

Give it a go and see what happens!

Hi Stuart
Has the code been updated to support multiple inverters?

Regards
Dave

Installed the new SMA SW this evening, and the result is almost successful, I think :slight_smile: . My PV unit consists of two SMA 3000TL-21 inverters; East and West.

I was able to connect to both inverters (…but only one at a time…) and get, given that it is dark outside now, what seems to be sensible readings. I would be happy having two nodes in emonCMS, one for each inverter. Maybe it would be possible just to cycle the BT connection between the inverters?

This evening as the mod had been running really steady producing good data for two days :slight_smile: , I decided to play around with it to see if I could get it to see both inverters…

Had a quick look at the code, and i guess it is searching for multiple inverters in a SMA-BT network. When I logged onto my inverters using Sunny Explorer, while the Pi was running, I noticed Sunny Explorer could connect, but only see one inverter - no SB network. A while after powering off the Pi, the SB network seemed to reestablish.

Trying to get the EmonCMS up running again, I started to get inverter logon problems, but only when the response from the inverter contains more than one packet count (0101 and 0102). Maybe there is a clue here for you?

Yes that’s likely the root problem.

I’m out of the country at the moment, so will see what i can do next week.

Hello again, work is getting in the way at the moment.

Is there anyone on this forum willing to have a go at debugging or improving the code?

The problem is during the initial logon to the inverter - we can get multiple replies back (from each inverter) which need to be handled correctly and the serial number of each inverter stored.

When we request readings, we then loop through each inverter and get the readings as it does now.

The other possibility would be to hard code the serial numbers into the configuration file for multi-inverter setups.

I would very much like to help, but I’m afraid it’s way
above my skill level. Maybe I can do a hack based on hard coding the serial numbers, but that’s not really useful to anyone but me.

Again I’d love to help but I too don’t have the required knowledge to code.

Regards
Dave

I would like the SMAtoMQTT within Home Assistant. I have already a private MQTT server running on my Rasparry Pi3 and I checked with hcitool scan that its sees my SMA Sunnyboy. As the data is send to a the MQTT server it should be easily linked Home Assistant.

Can someone explain how I should get the python program reporting to my MQTT Server.
Where do I need to locate the .py files, how do they start running

Regards,

Eddy