RS485 to ESP32 or ESP8266

ESPHome
1

Hi all,

I am looking at connecting my solar inverter to home assistant and after some research and looking through the manual, my inverter has RS485 compatibility. My inverter is the PowerOne (ABB) Aurora PVI-3.0/3.6/4.2-TL-OUTD. I have seen people using rs485 to usb and connecting it to a raspberry pi but my inverter is outdoors and quite far away from where my home assistant server is setup. I’d like to use an ESP32 or 8266 to communicate back to the home assistant server as I’ve already got experience in powering it outdoors and how the system works, but I’m not sure where to start with getting the information of rs485 and reading it on the esp32 to send it back to home assistant. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

2

RS485 is used precisely for long cables. Up to 4,000 meters. Just run the 485 to your server and put the USB adapter there.

3

Wiring is simple. You just need $2 RS485-TTL converter between Esp32 and inverter.
If your inverter use modbus protocol, esphome has component for that.