@batpred 

Ok. So you didn't login to the dongle at all, just made the router allocated IP address static in the router settings?

I have got HA up and running. Do you know if there is a guide to get the Solis added in?

When I setup HA it picked up our LG TV on the network, but not the Solis?

Thanks

I raised a few questions to Solis regarding hardening of the installation. Cybersecurity is not as bad as the Fogstar Seplos battery, but there's still some way for them to go.. They do have WPS3 on the latest dongle. 

But of course, the upside is that connecting to it using the solis modbus HA integration is very straightforward, no passwords, etc

Posted by: @bash

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I have got HA up and running. Do you know if there is a guide to get the Solis added in?

The soliscloud integration is probably the simplest to get started with. I also asked Solis Support to increase my data poll frequency to once a minute and they did it. Still the app only updates every 5 minutes. At least this HA integration is a better backup:  https://github.com/hultenvp/solis-sensor/wiki  

Modbus docs are available here  https://solis-modbus.readthedocs.io/

It works better than the Solax modbus (that needs frequent reboots).  400 parameters, between what you can use to set the config of the inverter and the ones to plot all sorts of good high-res charts! Of course much of it is to do with operating in three phase mode or parallel.

Posted by: @bash

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When I setup HA it picked up our LG TV on the network, but not the Solis?

I just looked at the latest IP address that the hub/router had assigned... Sort by time?  Did you check if soliscloud reports it?

There's also something to control your LG TV! Fun to discover how much it can integrate in your home (and neighbourhood 😀 ).. 

@batpred 

Thanks. What do you run your HA server on? I'd hoped I could use the Samsung tablet for this, but it seems I can only use it as a client.

I managed to get on to the dongle. I had to factory reset it and reinstall. Interestingly it doesn't come with a password, you just set one when you first install it.

I can change the dongle IP address to match that of the router instead of dynamic if that is required.

Posted by: @bash

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@batpred 

Thanks. What do you run your HA server on? I'd hoped I could use the Samsung tablet for this, but it seems I can only use it as a client.

I was just looking into it earlier on, as it needs more storage... Currently a HP T520 Thin Client Mini PC 32GB Storage 8GB RAM, the HA team provided some instructions. 

@batpred 

I have a couple of old Ish small desktop Dells that won't run windows 11.

I think their power draw shouldn't be too much as it'd need to run 24/7 so I might chuck Linux on one.

Posted by: @bash

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@batpred 

I have a couple of old Ish small desktop Dells that won't run windows 11.

I think their power draw shouldn't be too much as it'd need to run 24/7 so I might chuck Linux on one.

If you're comfortable with imaging PCs, the process for installing HA onto X64 will deal with the operating system for you. In essence, you download a bootable image to a USB drive, boot the PC up from that to get a Linux environment and then use that to run the HA installer that'll put the image onto the desktop's hard drive.

@majordennisbloodnok 

Thanks. Yes, no problem.

Where is the best place to get an image and what image would be recommended as I'd imagine there are plenty of choices with Linux.

Posted by: @bash

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Where is the best place to get an image and what image would be recommended as I'd imagine there are plenty of choices with Linux.

I just went for haos, that includes whatever the home assistant group supports, I think Ubuntu. It is all in the page in the link I shared before. That has links to the images, etc. You just need a usb stick to get started and to be comfortable configuring the bios options etc. 

Mine has been setup for a while. So I just apply the updates to the os core that the home assistant group makes available regularly.. a year ago there was the odd release with some niggles but it has worked very well since. 

The system can keep x backups etc, so you just configure it once.. some updates you can configure to be applied automatically and keep backups automatically. 

The ha support is based on GitHub etc. most of the integrations are well explained. 

@bash, I agree with @batpred here. The various paths for installing Home Assistant are listed at the HA installation page and the most appropriate if you have an old PC you can dedicate as an HA server is this section here on that page. It is perfectly possible to install HA onto pre-existing operating systems (Linux, Windows, MacOS etc.) but that often adds an extra level of unnecessary complexity.

@bash — I also agree, an image based installation is the simplest, easiest way to go, even if simple and easy are relative terms when it comes to HA. HA makes available various 'official' images, see the major's links and this one which is a direct link to the current image itself (it's compressed, so you will need to decompress it using 7Zip), which is (or at least was when I did it) an image of a minimal Alpine linux OS plus the whole HA installation. An image is a 'bit by bit' snapshot of an entire disk. Instead of copying file by file, you copy (make an image of) the entire disk at its most basic level, OS, boot code and all. The steps are:

(1) create a bootable 'live' USB stick, Bootable means it can start itself, 'live' means the OS is held in RAM, rather than being placed on a drive, which in turn means it can work on the effectively dormant PC disk. Note that this 'live' OS isn't HA, it is some other OS that will do the heavy lifting for you

(2) there are various ways of creating bootable 'live' USB sticks. I have used both Rufus and Ventoy (both work well enough) and used a Win PE OS as the 'heavy lifting' OS. If this is all Ancient Greek to you, you need to spend a bit of time reading up on 'live' OS installations. In reality, it doesn't matter which 'live' OS you use, as long as it has basic hard disk management tools within it. I normally use Macrium Reflect (Free), but again other similar hard disk management tools are fine 

(3) once you have a bootable USB stick with a live OS on it, copy the HA image to the USB stick, and boot the recipient PC with that USB stick. You may or may not need to go into the BIOS to change the boot options (so you can boot from the USB stick) or sometimes you can get to a one off boot menu that lets you choose what to boot from. You need to read the manual for the recipient PC to see what the options are

(4) once you have got into the 'live' OS, use that OS's hard disk management tool to copy the HA image to the recipient PC's hard disk

(5) finally, remove the USB stick and reboot the recipient PC (with any necessary BIOS changes to boot from the hard disk) and voila, it should boot into the minimal linux OS from which you can then start HA (again. follow the 'official' HA instructions).

It goes without saying it is never as simple as this. There are gotchas all over the place, things like boot mode (legacy/MBR or UEFI), 32 bit vs 64 bit PCs, file systems (FAT 32 etc), discovering your USB stick is too small to hold all the files and God knows what else, but persist, and you will get there. If you are not used to doing this sort of stuff, it can all be a bit scary at first, but bear in mind it is very hard to completely brick your PC (next stop the tip). Even if you end up with a totally unbootable PC, you can still go back to square one and start all over again, making incremental changes as you go, until you get a working system.    

Just wanted to share a link here to the "process" I am following to get a contract (possibly with Octopus) to export. I do not have PV at the moment, but may as well have it ready.

And by @majordennisbloodnok 's calcs, the battery that could have cost me £1000 can be worked by Solis AI to get  a yearly return of return of £87..