Long time lurker, first time messaging. For starters, thank you for the effort you’ve put in during the past 3-4 years. It can’t be easy to do this alongside the day job! And there are some truly ungrateful posters here who seem to feel entitled to a level of service that really isn’t reasonable. You get what you pay for, folks.
I’m guessing you are still working through the backlog of email requests, but just a heads up that I dropped you a request for access.
Thanks @potating.cat I’ve got though the backlog so I’m adding people every few days. I’ve added you today (if I’m matched up your email to your username on here) . Agreed with the posts but I’ve got close to 700 people running it so I can’t that bad!
Hi Guy,
been reading this with interest for a while now (appreciating the hard work) and finally had my solar installed, have emailed you a request for access to your repo.
Thanks in advance.
Just wanted to share the success I’ve had with Guy’s plugin over the past few weeks. I’m based in the UK and my energy provider Octopus runs a “power up” scheme where you get around 18 hours notice ahead of a 1-3 hour period the following day for free electricity. I’m working towards a HA-driven automation that lets me set the time period via a UI dashboard and then does the rest for me, hoovering up as much free electricity as I can. Thanks to Guy’s libraries this is working flawlessly!
I do have a stupid newbie problem, though, which has defeated me after several hours of tinkering and searching on forums/google; I hope someone can point me in the right direction:
I have set up two input_datetime helpers (managed via the UI), set to have only time and not date attributes. In the automation I am trying to set the lux_ac_charge_start2 and _end2 times based on the values in the corresponding input_datetime helpers. That is the final piece of the puzzle for me, everything else is up and running ok. I can successfully hard code the time values (which I did for testing purposes) and they get correctly pushed to the inverter. But I get an “Error: Invalid time specified: input_datetime.only_time for dictionary value @ data['time']” response from the trace log when I try to use the input_datetime helpers.
I cannot for the life of me figure out what I’m doing wrong. Snippet within the automation as follows:
In this example the first action works fine. The second fails with the error. If I replace input_datetime.only_time with e.g. “07:00:00” it works perfectly (but obviously that doesn’t solve my problem).
I’ve read around enough to know that (I think) this means the “time” property in the data dictionary isn’t the right ‘time’ type, and that if you’re using an input_datetime, you need to ensure it doesn’t have a date attribute (which it doesn’t). So this should work, shouldn’t it? I’ve tried both UI-managed input_datetime and a helper defined manually in configuration.yml, same issue with both.
TIA for anyone who can point me in the right direction! I’m sure I’ve missed some super basic thing in my frustration.
Happy to provide more debug info as necessary. This seems to me to be likely a syntax issue so I haven’t provided all my version numbers. Everything was last updated mid August.
I would put it on my Github issues page, it’s more likely to be seen by people using my integration and I already mostly do this for something else (look at the code for my “Quick Charge”) that should fix it as you are doing basically the same thing.
Hi @guybw , I have sent you an email (my email is [email protected]) and I am waiting for your response. Please add me to the access list so I can access your GitHub. Thank you very much!
Huge thanks to Dante for the Card and of course Guy and Zak @ MonitorMy.Solar.
Note: In the GitHub repo I also shared a method to forward data from the dongle to a local machine on my Tailscale network, which then securely relays it via Tailscale to a VM running Home Assistant over MQTT.
