Monitoring a Fronius inverter / home automation / mac

scotsman
scotsman Registered Users Posts: 2
in Advanced Solar Electric Technical Forum #1
I have a Fronius IG 3000 inverter, and a mac mini running as a server. I'd like to capture the data somehow. Eventually I'd like to make the data available as an xml feed to my home automation system (Indigo) to add to my house interface that I can access from anywhere.

First step is to get the data out of the Fronius. How? I have looked at the datalogger web and can't really justify the cost. Any other solutions?

I do see an program that someone has written called fslurp that can pull the data through an 'Interface Card Easy" - http://fslurp.sourceforge.net - but I have no clue how to do use this with my mac.

Any suggestions of how to start this project?

Thanks!
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Comments

  • westyd1982
    westyd1982 Solar Expert Posts: 85 ✭✭
    #2
    Re: Monitoring a Fronius inverter / home automation / mac

    I seriously looked at getting a Fronius inverter for my grid-tied system because of the availability of an open source access to the data. My set up had enough shading issues, I ended up going with Enphase and their awkward data interface. fslurp should work fine as a command line tool (Terminal) on your Mac. You probably need a USB to Serial cable and then build a serial cable from this cable to the inverter. To compile fslurp, you need to install XCode on your Mac if you haven't already. Before you compile (make), you probably need to edit the fslurp code to have the correct serial port for your Mac and the correct baud rate for the inverter.
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  • scotsman
    scotsman Registered Users Posts: 2
    #3
    Re: Monitoring a Fronius inverter / home automation / mac

    Thanks for the helpful reply! That certainly seems like a solution that could work.

    My next problem is that the inverter and my server are not close. I have an ethernet cable nearby but running a serial cable is tricky. I wonder if a wireless serial connection might work, like this product:

    http://www.wcscnet.com/HdwBTRS232.htm
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  • westyd1982
    westyd1982 Solar Expert Posts: 85 ✭✭
    #4
    Re: Monitoring a Fronius inverter / home automation / mac
    scotsman wrote: »
    I wonder if a wireless serial connection might work, like this product:

    http://www.wcscnet.com/HdwBTRS232.htm

    This would probably work fine, but it is expensive and you need power at both ends. Would it be too difficult to pull either 2-pair telephone cable or Cat-5 ethernet cable from the inverter to your server and solder on DB-9 connectors to make it a serial cable? A wire will be much more reliable and cheaper.
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  • amosnomor
    amosnomor Registered Users Posts: 9 ✭
    #5
    Re: Monitoring a Fronius inverter / home automation / mac
    westyd1982 wrote: »
    ... Before you compile (make), you probably need to edit the fslurp code to have the correct serial port for your Mac and the correct baud rate for the inverter.
    Both the serial port and baud rate are settable from the command line in fslurp. And although I haven't tried compiling it on an Apple OS, it shouldn't be too hard to port. The only OS specific feature might be the ioctl for setting up the serial port.
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