I’m upgrading my filtration system and while looking for an automatic valve for filtering/Backwashing I found this one from Astrapool that has a modbus interface and quite some documentation:
I think it will be cool having it hooked to an Arduino/pi serving as a modbus master to then allow HA integration.
I never did anything similar so checking if there are others willing to cooperate on this idea - but also looking to hear feedbacks on this topic.
Thanks
I no longer have a pool, but happy to help out in any way I can.
Thanks @nickrout !
do you have experience in coding?
I was thinking about using a nano PI with minimalmodbus MinimalModbus — MinimalModbus 1.0.2 documentation that is written in phyton and then post the readings using MQTT so that it would be then relatively easier to integrate with HA
If you don’t have much coding node-red has a full set of modbus nodes. You could use that on a pi for the skimmer and also in HA. This guy has a pretty through series on node red. That with the documentation you have shouldn’t be too daunting.
the valve has serial modbus, so the PI need to gather those info through it. Then we have to think how to forward those reading to HA.
I’d guess that most of the people implementing this will run a sort of bridge on a small pi (a nano or pico or maybe an Arduino) very closely installed near the valve (given the requirement of the serial connection). For the same reasons I don’t think ppl will run HA on the same device so we need to come up with a network based forward mechanism. Forwarding those info over Modbus TCP is one road - but thought that maybe is easier and more open send it to a MQTT broker. From there then the reading can go technically to any other systems support MQTT.
Thanks will look at it. My first thought was using MinimalModbus as it seems there is already plenty done in terms of gathering serial modbus info to a PI. Then the rest of the coding would involve scheduling and forwarding the readings to a MQTT broker.
I’m pretty sure that is what modbus is. From what I’ve read the remote node gets an IP address. Then queries are sent to the address in modbus protocol and returned as such. It’s basically mqtt just in binary format.
Nodered and HA can both read modbus protocol, you should only need to setup a client at the skimmer.
Home Assistant has serial modbus. I already sent a link to this page, but this will point to the serial section: Modbus - Home Assistant
thanks Nik, but this involve in hooking a pi to the valve and running HA on it? I have HA running somewhere else. So my idea was to find a way to forward such readings over network to my HA main instance
on a side note from the HW perspective I was planning to purchase a PI ZERO W with this hat board for the modbus connection:
https://www.waveshare.com/rs485-can-hat.htm
thoughts?
Good point if there is some distance between the rs485 and the computer running HA.
I found a couple of projects named modbus2mqtt, but none seemed active.
Be aware that esphome has modbus code inside. Just another option perhaps?
Im not familiar with esphome just read some basic documentation - I understand yes it could be an option. Will look better at it - THANKS!!!
There is now a fork of esphome with modbus support Read modbus with ESP32 and ESPHome - #19 by nikito7
@stepir, I am also interested in the subject. I have an automatic valve from AtralPool that I would like to integrate into HA. Have you made any progress with the project or have you abandoned it?
BR,
Cosmin
unfortunately not - my pump is controlled also by a ExoIQ and turn out the backwash valve was not compatible with it
Too bad, thanks for the answer.
BR,
Cosmin