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Recently I had to debug a strange behavior in my photovoltaic system. I needed data history from a Tesla Powerwall 2 (with backup module) and a SolarEdge HDWave inverter.

Both the battery and the inverter and accessible from local LAN, and I really dislike to rely on external websites, so I decided to have a look to get the raw data directly from the appliances. I already use Zabbix for monitoring and Grafana for dashboards, so my goal was to stick with them. Sadly, I wasn't able to find a Zabbix template for that purpose (but there's some for Grafana) - I had to change the Grafana script to a Zabbix external script and template.

While Tesla Powerwall expose some nice and documented API, SolarEdge is a little bit more tricky, you need to enable MODBUS over TCP (disabled by default) and use it to access the inverter information. I still miss the single panel information that is displayed on SolarEdge monitoring site - probably the only alternative to catch that info is to sniff packets sent from the inverter to the site, not a solution everyone can implement (I still keep an old HUB for this kind of situations). Shame SolarEdge, shame.

That's a really quick and dirty job, I just needed the data for debugging - I'm publishing the scripts just in case someone in the same situation can make use of them.

You can find the Zabbix Powerwall template here:

https://github.com/Emidio/zabbix_template_powerwall

and the Zabbix SolarEdge inverter template here:

https://github.com/Emidio/zabbix_template_solaredge_modbus

 

Recently I've been asked to setup some VMWare VSphere servers (free edition) implementing some kind of backup of the virtual machines on a secondary server.
The choice for secondary server was Openfiler - compared to FreeNAS (I tested both) looked definitively more robust and stable.

I configured all VMWare hosts had a secondary storage (NFS) mounted from Openfiler, to easily perform backups on the Openfiler storage.

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After some considerations about smart watches I finally decided to buy a Pebble this summer (some weeks before the price drop to 99$). It worked just fine and I finally got notifications for phone calls I cared about, emails, messages (thanks to Pebble and YaNC).

Everything worked until I start getting some weird behavior on my Pebble screen: random pixels, some white/black line. Changing the watch-face usually solved the issue, but it started getting worst to the extent the screen was no more readable. Getting a notification and being unable to read it was totally making my Pebble not usable. Even just reading time and date started to be odd.

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This is a recipe my mom ported to Italy from her birthplace - Ethiopia. It's a meat based spicy dish (and my favorite one), using a spice mix called berberè.

  • 1 Kg of meat
  • 1 big onion (chopped in small pieces)
  • 2 hg of butter
  • 2 cans of peeled tomatos
  • 4 spoons of berberè
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