Solar Watch

This project contains scripts and configuration for retrieving the data from a GoodWe solar inverter, storing it in InfluxDB and visualizing it via Grafana. It is meant for being run on a Raspberry Pi.

Setting Up the Raspberry Pi

Note: I have a Raspberry Pi 4 8 GB RAM with Raspberry Pi OS 64 Bit, but other configurations may work as well.

Installing the OS

Use the Raspberry PI OS Imager for setting up your PI. Make sure to enable SSH access and WiFi and use raspberrypi.local as host name.

Provisioning the Required Software

Clone the project on some other machine (i.e. not the Pi):

git clone git@github.com:gunnarmorling/solar-watch.git
cd solar-watch

Then install the required software on the Pi using Ansible and the provided playbook.yml file (adjust the hosts file as needed):

ansible-playbook -i ansible/hosts ansible/playbook.yml

Initializing the Project

SSH into the Pi:

ssh -i ~/.ssh/<your key> pi@raspberrypi.local

On the Pi, clone the project:

git clone https://github.com/gunnarmorling/solar-watch.git
cd solar-watch

Start InfluxDB and Grafana:

docker compose up -d

Create a Python virtual environment and install the required Python dependencies:

python3 -m venv .env
source .env/bin/activate
pip install goodwe

Change INVERTER_ADDRESS in post-data.sh to the address of your inverter.

Invoke post-data.sh and verify data shows up in InfluxDB and Grafana (see below for endpoints). If it does, register crontab entries for your desired logging cadence:

crontab -e

# E.g. like this for logging every 30 sec
* * * * * /home/pi/projects/solar-watch/post-data.sh >> /tmp/solar-watch.log 2>&1
* * * * * sleep 30 && /home/pi/projects/solar-watch/post-data.sh >> /tmp/solar-watch.log 2>&1

Web Interfaces

Use username "admin" and password "adminadmin" for authenticating with both InfluxDB and Grafana. These are the endpoints:

InfluxDB: http://raspberrypi.local:8086/
Grafana: http://raspberrypi.local:3000/

Useful Commands

Updating all packages:

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade

Exporting and importing data from/into InfluxDB (run from within the Influx container via docker exec --tty -i solar-watch-influxdb-1 bash):

influxd inspect export-lp \
  --bucket-id 7f830c08c8b564f3 \
  --engine-path /var/lib/influxdb2/engine \
  --output-path /tmp/solar-data/export.lp \
  --compress

influx write \
  -b solar-data \
  -o solar-watch \
  -p ns \
  --format=lp \
  -f /tmp/solar-data/export-lp \
  --compression=gzip

License

This code base is available ander the Apache License, version 2.

gunnarmorling / solar-watch