As promised some time ago here is the post explaining how I use my Raspberry PI to monitor my SolarPanel Output. I use PHP for this mather.
When I bought my solar panels back in november 2012, I knew that i wanted a Raspberry to communicate with the Solar inverter and read out the values to store them in a database. My preferred language to use was PHP. I will show you how I did this.
First a summary of the equipment I used :
- 11 x Sharp ND-R250A5 High-performance photovoltaic modules (2750WP total)
- Mastervolt XS3200 Solar inverter
- Raspberry PI Model B (512MB)
- Aten UC232A RS-232 to USB converter
- Mastervolt PC-Link RS-485 to RS-232 Converter