ESP8266 with Dumb Solar Inverter

Has anyone here connected their older solar inverter (no LAN/WLAN) to HA through a ESP8266/NodeMCU? I have an older inverter that has a RS485 serial connection available and want to log stats to HA (or secondary, PVoutput > HA).

If anyone has any experience with this, I’d love to hear about it.

Cheers!

Has nobody done this with an ESP?

I have quite a few esp8266 / esp32 mcu’s in my system. I have not setup a RS485 connection with the ESP’s but, I use them for connected sensors and then send the data to HA via MQTT. It should not be hard to use the esp8266 to get the RS485 values from the solar unit and then send the data via MQTT to HA, maybe a MQTT sensor?

Try here:

Thanks for the reply. I have a RS485 TTL module on the way so once that arrives I’ll have a play around.

It certainly looks possible! I may actually prefer output to PVOutput.org then use HA to import data from there.

You can do either or both. I prefer keeping everything local.

I found this site which goes into the MQTT side of things:

hey
i am working in the same project now
and i need for your help
if you finshed it can you give me the code

I ended up using a raspberry pi instead.

how did u do that , can u give some details ?