We recently had a 5.94KW solar PV system installed – twenty-two 270W panels (14 on the northish side of the house, 8 on the eastish side), with an ABB PVI-6000TL-OUTD inverter. Naturally I want to be able to monitor the system, but this model inverter doesn’t have an inbuilt web server (which, given the state of IoT devices, I’m actually kind of happy about); rather, it has an RS-485 serial interface. ABB sell addon data logger cards for several hundred dollars, but Rick from Affordable Solar Tasmania mentioned he had another client who was doing monitoring with a little Linux box and an RS-485 to USB adapter. As I had a Raspberry Pi 3 handy, I decided to do the same.

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