Solar Controller Hacking

A project that was started last year has finally received some attention.

A Raspberry Pi Zero W sits in my Van keeping tabs on the temperature of the fridge, it would send me alerts on high temps via my Telegram assistant. Worked well but as the fridge ran off solar I wanted to expand the system to monitor the solar panel and battery installed. I asked the manufacturer of the solar regulator for instructions on how the device communicates to the optional LCD screen they sell. They declined.

I used an ADAM-4561 to interrogate it. I could see some transmissions using IO-Ninja but nothing really made much sense. I thought it must be using Modbus RTU. With some digging on the internet, I found it was in fact Modbus and some registers are actually the same as other brands. I found some free software that runs on Windows that communicated and gave me back some values. At this point, I knew it was close to working.

Started making a Node-RED Project to handle the data. After some digging, I found someone had already done a lot of the leg work. (Source below)

The Pi is now connected to my IoT infrastructure which is on AWS. The data is transmitted via MQTT and is logged to a database and then becomes available to me via a Telegram Bot etc.

With 5 Data points logging every 30 minutes and a 30 heartbeat, the data usage is about 3MB / Month.

The PiZero is able to be powered by the solar regulator itself and draws up to 98mA.

#data #iot #solar #project #database

#AWS #MQTT #RS485 #cats

github.com/AdamWelchUK/NodeRedEPEverDashboard