Technology

Tesla Powerwall and Solaredge inverter monitoring with Zabbix

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

JComments with GDPR compliance

Starting from 25 May 2018 websites with EU users have to be GDPR compliant. GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) intention is to make users aware of what a website is asking them to share as personal data and the use the site is going to do with their data. Looks good, but for small no profit sites and blogs that's a real pain. Most of authors don't have any idea about how to implement compliance and what really GDPR is asking them. Cookies (those small pieces of information the site store on client site to improve their services and to have meaningful statistics. Knowing you're the same visitors from this morning in most cases doesn't mean they're tracking.

VMWare VSphere 5.x/6.x - Ghetto VCB and SMTP firewall rule

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.

Pebble screen tearing fix

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.

Site update

After Joomla 2.5 being released (on January the 24th, 2012 - see article) I looked forward to update this site to the new release. It was stuck at 1.7, and I just liked to test and have a look at the new version. I though in a few days I had the site online using the new code, but I was terribly wrong. I jumped right into the plugin and extensions updates, not mentioning I modified the source code in some point to correct some small bug.

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