Solcast Global Solar Power Forecast Integration

Feature Requests
280

@anon7821378 like WTF, was it due to the issue I have opened? Is this an adult way of dealing with things? It’s absolutely OK if you are tired of supporting your work and won’t maintain it anymore. But completely removing a public repo from Github? Is this a pissing match or what?

To explain to others, I have opened an issue on the repo yesterday because the integration reported an error (“SOLCAST - HTTP sites_data error: Solcast Error gathering rooftop sites data.”). There was a lot of people commenting on that and saying that it doesn’t work for them too and as it later came up, the problem was probably on Solcast side.
Nevertheless, @anon7821378 showed up after all the comments from other people and posted this message:

`Maybe instead of opening the same issue over and over, users start to learn to search and check closed issues. If you had bothered you would see this question already has been answered.

This isn’t a big problem… a pain, yes.

creating a new api key WILL NOT solve your problem!! Don’t waste your time doing this!

Biggest issue is that the sensors drop out, and this is being addressed… so when users do get a 429 status the sensors will continue to work `

To what I have replied that my issue was not with 429 status and honestly, I didn’t have any way of knowing if the problem is on Solcast side or integration side. A simple “problem is on Solcast side” would make sense in this case.

Also, nobody in the issue thread has insulted @anon7821378 or made any inappropriate comment (I still have all replies in my email if anyone wants to check) and didn’t demand immediate fix or anything else that is usual in situations like this. Most people just calmly reported it’s not working for them and some made some hints it might be a solcast problem, the discussion was extremely calm and friendly.

So if this is what @anon7821378 calls “bunch of self righteous ppl that demand they get what they want”, then I don’t know…

If there was any private communication I am not aware of and which made @anon7821378 so pissed off, then ok, but still removing a repo from github is way off.

1 Like
281

I have noticed I still had the page with the issue opened, so for anyone wondering, here is a printout: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wub02za70eys4u51czs3u/output.pdf?rlkey=0ax5hyfnzoqd847952093xgqt&st=l6eupa0p&dl=0

1 Like
282

Actually I didn’t even see the last post @anon7821378 made there. So there was certainly something else that made him angry. But still, it’s better to keep calm and not make decisions like this.

283

@anon7821378 thanks for your great work on this component I and many others have found it extremely useful. I do apologize for those who have made your ongoing engagement intolerable.

As you have released as open source the community can fork and carry your work on.

12 Likes
284

What a tragic and absolutely unnecessary end to one of the most useful integrations. I have based tons of automations on the solar forecast from the solcast integration as this was really great and most of the times spot on. Now, I have to rework all the automations and live with the fact that they won’t work as great as before. Thanks for all the haters driving @anon7821378 to this decision!

@anon7821378: Thanks for the great work on the integration!

9 Likes
285

ouch that hurts. That integration is / was one of the backbones of all my energy related automations.

Hope someone will pick up.

Once again shows how grateful most of us should be for people not only providing but supporting their integrations that we all build on top.

Thanks a lot @anon7821378 for your precious work.

2 Likes
286

Does anyone have a recent fork of the project? Should be easy to switch to that in the short term but obviously any API changes going forward would require a maintainer.

Honestly people that delete public repos like that with no notice or warning should be banned from the community. Childish behaviour.

EDIT: This fork has the most up to date code I can find, v4.0.22, but has no releases. I don’t know if that’s an issue for the way HACS works. This fork has a v4.0.21.1 release.

I do not know what changed in v4.0.23 though and I can’t find any forks that have that release.

287

Yeah. Looking at the archived issue where oziee got angry, it looks like what really made him angry was incompetence of people to be able to read the stack traces and understand what it means.
That’s really silly. Not everyone is a coder to understand such stuff. And not everyone who is using HA is even skilled in IT stuff.
So unfortunately it really start to look childish and not triggered by any haters as he tries to make it.
At least there were no haters in this issue where he got angry. We can’t be sure whether there were some in other issues or elsewhere, though.

Anyway I agree that deleting widely used public repo is really not something sane person should do. Even if there were some haters, deleting the repo mostly harm others. Hater won’t care.

Edit: It starts to look like complete brainfart on oziee side. He already completely deleted his Github account with a lot of other repos :cry: What a pity. Such a good chap he was…

2 Likes
288

I have a working code of 4.0.22, 4.0.23 was apparently released very shortly before the repo was deleted, I don’t know what was there, but if someone did make it and upgraded before the repo was deleted, we can check and compare. 4.0.22 works though and anyone who is still using it does have the files in their HA installation, it’s easy to extract it from there, it’s in the /homeassistant/custom_components/solcast_solar folder of HA core.

The root folder only contained the readme, license file and hacs.json which is a fine for integration with HACS.

289

I just use restful sensors. Interestingly they were not producing data the other day too. It was definitely a Solcast issue despite what their monitoring page said.

Rest sensors if anyone want’s them:

rest:
  - resource: https://api.solcast.com.au/rooftop_sites/***YOUR_SITE_ID_HERE***/forecasts?format=json&api_key=***YOUR_API_KEY_HERE***&hours=72
    scan_interval: '00:30:00'
    sensor:
      - name: "Solcast Forecast Data"
        unique_id: 7390082f-b19d-4301-b386-36823458bac1
        force_update: true
        value_template: "{{ value_json.forecasts[0].pv_estimate|round(1) }}"
        unit_of_measurement: kW
        device_class: power
        json_attributes:
        - forecasts
    
      - name: "Solcast Forecast 10"
        unique_id: 829f84af-93dc-4c11-bfe3-75363a76c310
        force_update: true
        value_template: "{{ value_json.forecasts[0].pv_estimate10|round(1) }}"
        unit_of_measurement: kW
        device_class: power
        state_class: measurement
        
      - name: "Solcast Forecast 90"
        unique_id: a2a5acd4-4d46-4c12-896e-8d96389c58b9
        force_update: true
        value_template: "{{ value_json.forecasts[0].pv_estimate90|round(1) }}"
        unit_of_measurement: kW
        device_class: power
        state_class: measurement

Note however that I have an early adopter account so have 50 API calls a day. You may have to reduce the scan interval if you have a newer account with 10 API calls a day.

8 Likes
290

That is probably the best we can get, plus there is some commit on top of the code from the repo owner.
The fact that it does not have a release is not an issue. The owner can just create a release (or anyone can fork it and create a release by themselves) and even without a release it can be installed in HA manually.

291

I’ve made a fork of the FredricMa’s repo and created a release, if anyone needs to add the integration, you can do it by navigating into HACS/integrations, then click the three dots in the top right corner, select Custom repositories, put into the repository field https://github.com/Dehumanizer77/ha-solcast-solar and select “Integration” category.

I’ll keep that fork up, but I’m not a python programmer so I can’t maintain it.

Also note that if you still have the integration installed and running, there is no need to re-add it, it will work, just there will be no updates (which won’t be anyway until someone will start maintaining it as ozzie has left it).

7 Likes
292

Thanks for creating the repo and the release so people can fix their installs :heart:

Do you plan to fix the links pointing to the old deleted repo and possibly also add the new one to hacs?

293

Pointing to a different repo won’t really “fix” anything except getting rid of the ghost update notifications. Existing installs should continue to work. The main problem going forward will be any maintenance around Solcast API changes.

294

FYI, your release tag is wrong, the v4.0.22 release and tag should point to commit 344b19e (or any of the previous ones saying “v4.0.22” because all but one of those changes only changes the readme file, which isn’t included by HACS).

Setting the “4.0.22” tag to a more recent commit (in this case 41ed6a0) will confuse matters.

295

@DragonQ sorry, you’re right… I have corrected the v4.0.22 tag to the correct commit and made an additional release v4.0.22.1 with the FredricMa’s commit.

296

Hi, i’ve cloned today’s (midnight) version of @anon7821378 repo as i have reported him an issue and he helped me to get it sorted out.

The last tag was v4.0.23.1. (tabascoz fork)

@anon7821378 thanks for all your work! As this extension is of great importance to everyone running solar production I am sure is much appreciated by everyone.

Despite all the headache. I hope you reconsider your decision and restore the repo :slight_smile:

.

1 Like
297

The 41ed6a commit isn’t on your v3 branch, I wonder where that went?

For now I’ve added it to a dev branch unless someone can confirm that commit was part of v4.0.23 or later.

298

Ehm… The user oziee does not seem to exist anymore on github and with that the whole repository is gone… Anybody else seeing that?

299

@twilek read through the last posts here…