Using an intermediate transmission of rs-232 data over esp for injestion into homeassistant?

[john2e3]

sounds complicated? probably.

i have a phocos any-grid solar inverter. the good folks here tell me it is a voltronic mppt inverter.
anyway, i have tried to use homeassisant in the past when connected directly but that did not work. i ended up with solaranzeige, a german solar inverter project. works good but because of bad cabling, my raspberry pi’s have been damaged (usb broke on 3) so i am unable to do any monitoring.
looking at some ideas, i am seeing projects like this Reading RS232 data from weighing Scale using ESPHOME so my question is, if i use an rs-232 to TTL conveter, then put that on a esp01 or esp8266, would it transmit the serial data over mqtt so that a separate home assistant machine would read it?
i cannot directly plug a full pi on the inveter beacuse there is no regular power there, i only have a micro usb port which i could power a pi zero or an esp so that is what i am hoping for.

any ideas?

[Mahko_Mahko]

I’m no expert but I would think it should be fine. I did something similar here.

I scored a Scorbot ER iii

I tried and abandoned a “pass through set-up”. My initial solution used a “pass-through” set-up, where by a “man-in-the-middle” sat between the Pendant and the robot (pendant port). It could listen to messages the Pendant sent and inject it’s own. [image] Initially this seemed to work quite well. But once I started adding more processing that the messages had to go through (to track what was happening in the pendant messages), I found that the latency seemed to cause communications issues. …

Do you just need to read data? Not inject commands?

@mulcmu came up with this approach which can simplify things.

And there’s Man In The Middle approaches around too.

ssieb/esphome_components/blob/73511655e27a3a438246d3e9b4d3ce7b3dcc6573/components/uart_mitm/README.md