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https://github.com/judasgutenberg/solark_live_data

Grab live data from the serial port on the inverter's WiFi Dongle
https://github.com/judasgutenberg/solark_live_data

esp8266 esp8266-arduino fine-grain-data local-monitoring solark solark-data

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Grab live data from the serial port on the inverter's WiFi Dongle

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This Arduino sketch allows you to intercept data communicated between your SolArk inverter and its WiFi dongle, allowing you to get power data much more quickly and at much finer granularity locally. You can then act on this data to do things like turn EV chargers on and off.



If you open up the shell of the WiFi dongle, you will find the unpopulated pin header where the serial port can be intercepted. The pins are spaced 0.2 mm apart, which is tighter than the normal 0.254 mm (0.1 inch) spacing.  But if you bend the pins inward on a three-pin 0.1-inch-pitch header and stuff it in those holes, it will hold with no soldering required and work reliably.

The logic levels of that serial port are 3.3v, so RX and TX can connect directly to pins on a 3.3v microcontroller.  For the wires in this photo, black is ground, green is Tx and white is Rx. They are connected to a D1 Arduino-style ESP8266 board (pin D8 is TX and pin D7 is RX). None of this affects the normal behavior of the dongle, which continues communicating data to Chinese intelligence agencies or whatever (disabling and re-enabling that remotely is something I will be exploring).



![alt text](dongle_serial.jpg?raw=true)



There is a constant stream of data coming from the inverter and going to the dongle.  Looking carefully at this data with knowledge of what values the SolArk cloud was reporting at the time (particularly the battery percentage, which changes slowly) I was able to find the packet containing the most important bytes. These packets are ASCII-encoded hexadecimal strings.  If you convert certain substrings of these hex values into either bytes or two-byte words (sometimes using 2's complement, where negative is important) then you will get the important values you most care about. I've figured out what these are, though I hope to find more (such as the raw voltage values from the solar panel strings and battery -- the former of which would help me determine how sunny it is, which I could then use to control a circulator pump for a solar hydronic system, while the latter would allow me to interpolate between the clunky integer steps of the battery charge percentage).



Since the ESP8266 doesn't fully support more than one serial port, I was forced to use the web page it serves to debug.



For now this sketch just produces a *-delimited list of values on the web page it serves:



1st is gridPower, 2nd is batteryPercentage, 3rd batteryPower (2's complement gives us negative for charging as opposed to draining), 4th is loadPower, 5th and 6th are the power produced by the two solar strings, and all this is followed by some integers whose purpose I do not yet know.



You will probably want to do something else with the data. What I do is send it to a MySQL server to log it with a timestamp so I can see pretty (and extremely-detailed) graphs, which put those produced on the data page served by MySolArk to shame.  I do that using the SolArk Copilot



https://github.com/judasgutenberg/SolArk_Copilot



communicating with the backend of my remote control system



https://github.com/judasgutenberg/Esp8266_RemoteControl