Hi all,
First time poster and wondering if someone can help me with this. I’m using Intelligent Octopus Go with a Zappi, but if the schedule suddenly starts outside of the usual overnight charge hours, it has been draining my house battery. I was advised to get home assistant and now have this set up with a Raspberry Pi, with the Zappi integrated no problem. Trying to integrate the solis modbus is proving tricky and although I have the IP address of the datalogger (as on my solis cloud app), when I try to input it, I get this message. Unknown error occurred.
Has anyone come across this before, please (and hopefully resolved it)?
Perhaps the port number is wrong, the field was pre-populated with 502.
Any advice gratefully received.
You may have a datalogger that does not expose a local address. There are only specific models that have this legacy feature.
What model of datalogger do you have?
I have one that is incompatible, and was toying with a hardware based solution, but I’ve literally just finished a SolisCloud API based pyscript based solution that converts dispatch windows into charging periods. Take a look here:
It is obviously provided without warranty . I’m not a coding expert so have heavily relied on AI to generate the code against my logic.
I spent a lot of time refining and it works perfectly for me. Providing you have the older firmware with only 3 charging slots available, it will be fine.
I did write another version for modbus which also is available.
I finally got it working! (‘Only’ took me about a man-day’s tinkering, over the weekend.) In case this helps others, here’s where I got stuck:
Generally learning how to use and configure Home Assistant - I only just got an EV last week, so I just setup an RPi + HA, to instantiate this functionality with my existing (since 2023) Solis solar PV system. HA has a steep learning curve, that’s for sure. I did some C and assembler programming about 25 years ago, but Python and YAML are new to me.
Specific problems encountered:
Do a <Ctrl+F> Search in all of these provided scripts for the author’s Octopus account number and replace each instance with your own. I thought i’d got them all, but hadn’t.
Confusion between Solis “Plant ID” and “Station ID”. I was erroneously using the former, but needed the latter. Until then, I was seeing an inscrutable error message from the Pyscript, which was barfing on a ‘None’ data type. This was caused by the Solis API returning an error message instead of the expected inverter data structure. Ideally, this eventuality should be trapped properly by the script - but I can’t really compain about deficiencies in free code!
Getting HA’s ‘Settings → System → Logs’ feature to show the log messages from the pyscript code was a feat in itself. Gratuitous Googling around this topic revealed a consensus of which magic runes to put in the ‘configuration.yaml’ file. That allowed me to figure out the issue with the ‘Station ID’ thing.
I never got the author’s dashboard code to work fully. Installing the missing ‘Mushroom’ cards via HACS was the first hurdle, but having fixed that - the Octopus sensors showed errors. I kept only the code for the lists of Octopus slots and corresponding Solis charging slots. I created a new dashboard in the HA UI, and robbed HA’s auto-generated code for the HA sensor cards for the Octopus ‘Charge Target’ and desired end-of-charge time. Now my dashboard is functionally equivalent to the screenshot.
. I’m not a coding expert so have heavily relied on AI to generate the code against my logic.