Get RAW data from a website on a local datalogger (solis in this case)

Configuration
1

Is there a way to parse raw data?

Use case:

I have a Solis WIFI logger (connected to a Solis Inverter, PV), which has a local little website. It uses ‘empty’ html (only text, tags and ids) which it fills using a javascript fetch every 10 seconds. So, this means scrape is of no use, as this does not process the javascript.

The response (from the local internal API) is a raw byte string, with readable chars in it like:

1801059223142012;750033;104;28.9;20;95;136;NO;

surrounded by loads of NULL (ascii 0 I presume).

What should I do to ‘scrape’ this string and parse it like

value_template: '{{ value.split(";")[4] | float(default=0) }}'

As the 5ths string represents the current power production.

Being able to do it this way, I would be totally independent of the soliscloud.com website, which for some reason has shut down it’s API capabilities (officially to fix some security issues, as I was told by the Solis support team). This would also enable a higher resolution sampling than the 300s that is used by the datalogger to send data to Soliscloud.com, meaning I will have a better measurement of daily production.

I hope someone has an idea how to do this or even better: I just overlooked some feature/platform/integration of the fabulous Home Assistant!

1 Like
2

Following, but that’s a fraction of the data available from the device!

3

If you have access to the date via local api, maybe a rest sensor could work:
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/rest/

4

Thanks for the suggestion. I looked into this and to my understanding the rest integration required a JSON response body, the this is just a raw string.

5

I know it’s just a fraction (and a very tiny one) of the data available. For starters I just want to get the actual Power production into HA. More and more I’m considering ditching the WiFi datalogger and switch to ModBus (using ESPhome) but I’m not there yet as this will be a whole new experience.

6

I wonder why those of us with the newer data loggers are having such issues, when old gen loggers seem to have multiple options available?

I bought a Shelly EM and monitor my incoming line and whole-home consumption so can do some basic stuff but would really like to leverage the data straight from the device. I’ve got a spare Pi Zero W sat around and so the ModBus device could be a way forward but is hardly plug and play!

Edit: This is where the work is being done, hopefully some progress https://github.com/StephanJoubert/home_assistant_solarman/issues/63

7

I took the step to start logging to HA via Modbus with a Raspberry PI in between HA and the inverter.

Based on the fantastic repo of incub/solis2mqtt, I made a version of my own with slightly different design principles.

My work (testing it right now) can be found here hvoerman/solis2mqtt.