Correct. 2nd from the right (or the bottom). It’s marked RS485
I’m away at the moment but it looks like my system suddenly started working the day after I left. I suspect the techs at Alpha must have remotely fixed it. The problem must have been with them not the installers.
I switched off the batteries before I left because it was randomly charging from then discharging to the grid!
I hope to get back and switch it all on by Monday
Ah, I hadn’t quite worked out the markings. But it’s immediately obvious. Second from the right will be the one I plug into. Hopefully it all works from there. I will be using an ESPuno with its ESP32-C6 and RS485 terminal, and Adafruit screen (Adafruit 128x64 OLED Bonnet for Raspberry Pi).
Hopefully it all comes together I’ll update when I have parts.
@worldvirus for our inverter, were the rj45 pins any different to the GitHub repos?
no the pins were as described. The 2 centre pins.
Sweet, I’ll update when its all together with a photo for the repo 
All setup and running!
I made a fork of the project and converted it to PlatformIO and added some extra debugging with the RGB LED the ESPuno dev board (link) provides, nothing major.
Possibly a silly question, but is anyone sourcing the power for the USB from somewhere on the inverter itself? Ironically, I don’t have a power point anywhere near my inverter, despite it powering the whole house, but nor could I find a service USB point anywhere on it.
The only thing I can see is that the Alpha documentation shows the RS485/CAN plug also having a 12v rail, but I’m not sure if that is going to be a suitable source for power. Obviously USB doesn’t need much, but I thought I’d see if anyone else was already using that (Or found another source of 5v/12v at the inverter).
If there is 12V on the RS485 you could drop that to 5 with a buck and run that right to the esp32 5V input. I wouldn’t use the USB for that.
in my SMILE-SPB system, there is 12V in the inverter, but that is a separate box from the EMS which is in battery #1.
Can confirm the 12v is there on the RS485 port. A simple regulator module later and it’s powering my esp32 perfectly.
Next challenge is that my G3-S5 appears to have modbus missing from its firmware, so will need to try and convince the installer to solve that.
I pushed some new code. There are some minor bugfixes, and I added some new diagnostic sensors to show the DC voltage and current. I recently had a failure in the DC shutoff breaker between the batteries and inverter. If I had seen these, I could have diagnosed it quicker. These two sensors show the values that the inverter sees. And if you look in the attributes, you can see the inverter values AND the values that the batteries report. (Of course, those two show be the same when things are working right.)
I’d love to hear how/if these work for the SMILE-G3 folks.
Oh yeah… I also added OTA image update.
Hi David, sorry missed these updates have run them now and this is what my inverter sees.
Just an update I’ve checked the Alpha Register parameter list with the Definitions.h. 0111H and 0112H correspond with 0x0111 and 0x0112 so I guess I’ll have to do some further testing.
@noisymime if you haven’t solved your RS485 problem then this may be an option for you.
Quick reply because I’m out of town…
Max Charge mode doesn’t honor the charge/discharge settings. It does what its name says, and charges at the maximum rate. Check out the “Controlling Your ESS” section of the README for a brief description of each mode. I built these mode to try to be useful. Please let me know if you feel they can be improved. (I could add more modes or tweak the existing ones.) My guess is that “Target SOC” will be what you want.
Also, not sure what you are looking at with 0x0111/0x0112 but just to clarify: those are current, not power.
Hope that helps.
Thanks David, that set me right. 0x012C and 0x012D is what I should have been looking at, but that is all correct too ( have no idea why it seemed to be confusing me yesterday) .
Your suggestion of using “Target SOC” works a treat so my nodeRed ‘charge everything all at once’ automation is now working.
My communication is not great; the picture in the previous post was included for your reference so you could see how the new version worked on the SMILE-G3 B5.
enjoy your time away
Hi,
I’m using this integration on my AlphaEss Smile B3.
To unload my batery to the grid, I use the “Target SOC” mode and set the “SOC Target” value.
It works fine but I can’t set the “SOC Target” lower than 30%.
Can I set the “SOC Target” value lower than 30% so I can unload my battery complete to the grid.
I chose 30% as an arbitrary safety limit back when I started this. But there is no reason you need to stick to that. Just edit Definitions.h and change the value of SOC_TARGET_MIN. Then rebuild. That will change Alpha2MQTT’s behavior as well as changing the mqtt autodiscovery settings which tell HA what values are allowed. That should be all you need.
I also push beyond 30% to the grid. But I’m not using “Target SOC” mode. My best value is if I push to grid between 4pm and 9pm. I use “Push to Grid” mode and I wrote some HA automation logic to try to dynamically optimize how much I push, based on how much I use that day. My rates are still high from 9pm to midnight (but not as high as 4-9) so I want to have enough left in the battery to meet my own needs. I typically find I’ve gotten to 10%-15% by midnight, and then my rates are cheap. The “Push to Grid” mode doesn’t use the SOC Target setting, so I never bothered to change it from the 30% value that I initially set.
Glad to hear your using this. Let me know how this change works.
