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Author Topic: Making a real time LED or LCD display  (Read 662 times)
2ndBillericay
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« on: October 30, 2010, 10:30:13 AM »

We have a Aurora 3.6 Inverter which has the radio card to transmit data to the PVI-Desktop Display / Data Logger but we would like to have a bigger unit that just showed Total Generated & Current Generation on a LED or LCD screen.

We have seen them for £600 upwards but as we have the data being transmitted on 868.25MHz already we wondered if anyone has tried to capture this data themselves ?

I have played with PicAxe & Arduino PICs (robot making) so it is the receiver unit that i am unsure of.

Any suggestions are welcomed.

Richard
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2.16 Kw = 9 x 240w on flat roof, South facing and at 20 degrees. - Installed 26-08-10
Nuclear Fussion Thermal system DeltaSol BS & DL2 - installed 25-03-11
Alan
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« Reply #1 on: October 30, 2010, 12:54:24 PM »

Link below
http://www.gsm-modem.de/ism_module_868_mhz.html

How far would the display be away from the Aurora inverter.

Why not just take the RS422 / 485 data out of the inverter
and display the information required on a Pic / Lcd display

Regards

Alan
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MikeD
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« Reply #2 on: October 30, 2010, 01:38:24 PM »

Perhaps a bit 'low-tech', but why not just buy an Owl electricity monitor and put its sensor clamp over the live wire from the invertor to the fusebox. The Owl will display instantaneous power and you can program it with the pence per KW figure so it can give you instantaneous pence and overall £ generated too.
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2ndBillericay
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« Reply #3 on: November 01, 2010, 06:51:29 PM »

I have sent an elmail to the Manufacturer in the States asking for advice - lets see how they respond.
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2.16 Kw = 9 x 240w on flat roof, South facing and at 20 degrees. - Installed 26-08-10
Nuclear Fussion Thermal system DeltaSol BS & DL2 - installed 25-03-11
roscoe
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« Reply #4 on: November 02, 2010, 12:22:30 AM »

You could also email these italian chaps as they seemed to do the software development, they were polite and helpful to me in the past.

http://www.power-one.it/digilab/Digi.aspx?Code=15

Solutions are rather messy/expensive ....

- sniff/decode the 868mhz signal from the wireless signal aka rfxCom type solution
rather technical and if you could persuade power one to issue spec under NDA it would be a little easier
still fair bit off effort to design ardino wireless receiver then output to large display, presume you mean monitor/tv

- hook up rs485 and wire to a pc and write application to query the inverter
again an NDA to get the protocol would be needed, but not too tricky
of course you could do this in an arduino and use the ethernet shield to format a basic web page

- use a current cost or other independant power moniter, the cc seems to have been well hacked
or use the owl one and use rfxcom to sniff the value

- I have the excellent Brultech ECM1240 with a local sqlite database populated by the free engineG program so it would be easy to extract current power and daily totals.  A further benefit is that this has 7 channels and does true NET metering so you'd know how much you export as well.  Also, this fires the data to google powermeter and pachube.  So an easy solution would be just to have the google power meter gadget as the whole display or do something like cycle through the daily/weekly/monthy.

I don't think there are any configurable analogue outputs on the inverter
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