polling sunny webbox to get pv plant data into indigo

[dtich]

hi all.

wondering if anyone has any experience or ideas with getting solar electric (pv) system data from a sunny boy (sma) plant equipped with a webbox comm interface?

my interest is in getting the relevant data into variables in indigo for display and use. e.g., would love to have the current mode, production watts, daily yield kWh, and total yield kWh in variables in indigo.

the relevant info might be here in the sma webbox cli/api handbook:

http://files.sma.de/dl/4253/SWebBoxRPC- ... 112713.pdf

i'm not up to snuff on programming so was hoping that either someone has already done this, or would have an interest in doing (small payment can be discussed), or it's so dang easy i just need a pointer or two and can be on my way... (not holding breath on that last one)...

the webbox page is:

http://www.sma-america.com/en_US/produc ... ebbox.html

the webbox is currently on my local net and accessible via ip, so i was hoping an http call might be super easy to accomplish, but not really sure..

any thoughts/ideas much appreciated!

[jay (support)]

It looks doable - unfortunately it's not a particularly straight-forward API. The communication is done via JSON strings so there'd be the need to build up the JSON requests then parse out the JSON responses. That extra complexity would be pretty difficult to debug without actually having the device on hand.

[dtich]

hey jay, thanks for looking.

I can allow access over the wan easily enough. what is the time commitment you think is involved to get a script together?

EDIT: and I wasn't assuming your time! I mean objectively for someone to tackle it..

[dtich]

for instance. it looks like I would be ok just doing this call:

6.1 RPC_GET_PLANT_OVERVIEW

in section 6.1. it outlines the syntax of the call, via http say, and then the response would be in the form given in that section. is it hard to parse that response into indigo vars?

[jay (support)]

Not really - json parsing isn't really all that difficult (we include the simplejson library). I expect someone could put together a script in a couple of hours if they had access. May not get very robust error handling but it would probably work OK.

[dtich]

great, thanks much for the pointers jay.

any takers out there, anyone interested?

[dtich]

how about --- $100 to the kind soul who will put a clean little script for this together?

- queries the webbox at 192.168.0.100
- queries over http post using rpc_get_plant_overview [section 6.1 of api guide]
- parses the responses into indigo variables [query param]:

-PV_Pac [GriPwr]
-PV_EToday [GriEgyTdy]
-PV_ETotal [GriEgyTot]
-PV_Mode [OpStt]

don't need units for anything, just values. if possible errors can return "n/a" as var data and log error in indigo. there should be a timeout for the query, maybe 1 minute, to free up the thread. the script should be configured as a background process to run every hour.

can't think of anything else 'necessary'... it really just needs to be very simple but robust.

thanks in advance to anyone willing to take this on!

[dtich]

...crickets....

nobody even a little interested?

[floodland]

I also have a Sunny Webbox, so this is somewhat interesting to me. I used to want to monitor it all the time, now I am content with the emails from sunny portal each night

[dtich]

yeah, i'd really like to get the info into indigo so i can have on control pages and set alarms and stuff..

hmmm.

[mreyn2005]

https://github.com/jraedler/SunnyWebBox

Python library for Sunny JSON data... This should make it really easy.

[dtich]

oh nice find! i'm gonna get into that shortly. thanks mreyn!!

[dtich]

well, this is still above my head, don't know how to implement... or even which folder to put it in!!

any advice whenever someone has a moment is appreciated.