Outback Data without Mate

[westbranch]

TomW I was reading this string on the Outback MX60 looking for an answer to a question:

is it possible to 'grab' the data the MX60 sends out using a PDA  with B&B's Portabella program? ie without using a Mate?  (I am looking for a Low power way of recording the data vs running a laptop plus inverter plus Mate...)

"Portabella is a basic serial communications program that sends and receives data through the serial port on your

Palm OS device and displays the bytes in an easy-to-read format."

and

"Display Area ............. The display on the left will show bytes transmitted and received in hex, while the screen

                           to the right will show them in ASCII. The bytes you send have a white background, while the

                           bytes you receive have a black background."

I already collect hourly the output of an XBM battery monitor and would like to add the MX60 data to it to compare what the battery is getting vs what the MX60 says it is sending to the battery at our cabin. this process all started when I suspected my battery was/is going south.

thanks for any comments

Eric

[TomW]

westbranch;

Well, near as I know the ONLY serial port [RS232] on the system is on the Mate.

Pretty much everythin I know is in this PDF:

PDF

The data is exported as ASCII numeric strings the lines have 14 comma seperated values and look like this:

0,00,00,00,119,119,00,02,000,01,246,008,000,045

BYTE

$1 Inverter address.

$2 Inverter current.

$3 Charger current..

$4 Buy current..

$5 AC In Voltage

$6 AC output voltage

$7 Sell Current

$8 FX operating mode.

$9 ERROR Mode

$10 FX AC Mode

$11 Battery Voltage divide by 10 to get actual.

$12 FX Misc

$13 Warning Mode

$14 CHKSUM

Without the Mate you are likely not going to do any data gathering directly from Outback products.

I have a perl script that gathers the data from the RS232 port on the Mate I could share.

I have a page up that displays the critical Outback / Mate data on a live web page so I can monitor the system from anywhere with internet. The meters are generated with php from data passed in from logging scripts and fed to the web regularly and automatically from the logging laptop here.

You can see that here:

http://stats.truetech.com/~tomw/RE/meters/meters.php

At 28.8 volts on the battery the meter looks like this:

It is a work in progress and has some bugs but works for me. I reluctantly post the link because I cannot offer help on doing it and it is buggy. Plus I don't need know it alls telling me my battery voltage set points are wrong, etc.

Thanks to RossW for creating the meter scripting for the analog meter display part and general help sorting out the geek bits.

Just my experience with it.

Tom

[N2UAD]

Hi TomW,

I just joined the forum and found your post. Soon we will be installing an Outback gridtie system here. I am looking for Perl scripts to get me started in reading system data from the Mate. I'm just looking for the communications parts as I already have Perl scripts monitoring the rest of my system and generating charts. I hate re-inventing the wheel. Already downloaded the Mate communications doc from Outback website. Are you willing to share your Perl code?
You can see some details of our systems here: www.haytown.ath.cx The Outback system is a replacement for our existing gridtie battery backup system.
I've used the ChartDirector Perl module from http://www.advsofteng.com/ to make my charts. It works well and the documentation is good. They also support PHP.

Thanks,
Rich

[TomW]

Hi TomW,

I just joined the forum and found your post. Soon we will be installing an Outback gridtie system here. I am looking for Perl scripts to get me started in reading system data from the Mate. I'm just looking for the communications parts as I already have Perl scripts monitoring the rest of my system and generating charts. I hate re-inventing the wheel. Already downloaded the Mate communications doc from Outback website. Are you willing to share your Perl code?
You can see some details of our systems here: www.haytown.ath.cx The Outback system is a replacement for our existing gridtie battery backup system.
I've used the ChartDirector Perl module from http://www.advsofteng.com/ to make my charts. It works well and the documentation is good. They also support PHP.

Thanks,
Rich

Rich;

Here is the perl script I use but for some reason I get a permissions error accessing it.

http://www.otherpower.com/images/scimages/4/mate.pl

Here is a cut and paste of it from my laptop that does the reading:

Code: [Select]

Dell:~# cat mate.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# Requires Device-Serial perl module.
use Device::SerialPort 0.05;
use strict;
my $mate = "/dev/ttyS1";
my $pass;
my $return;
# Constructor & Basic Values
#print localtime(); # amount of seconds since 1970, e.g. 573711711024370
my $ob = Device::SerialPort->new ($mate) || die "Can't open $mate:$!";

$ob->baudrate (19200) || die "fail setting baudrate";
$ob->parity ("none") || die "fail setting parity";
$ob->databits (8) || die "fail setting databits";
$ob->stopbits (1) || die "fail setting stopbits";
$ob->handshake ("none") || die "fail setting handshake";
$ob->dtr_active (1) || die "fail setting dtr_active";

$ob->rts_active (0) || die "fail setting rts_active";
#$ob->write_settings || die "no settings";
#commented out the write_strings as it seemed like it was turning off the inverter
#sleep 1;


#$pass = $ob->write("a") or die ("Could not write to mate: $!");

sleep 1;

if (($return = $ob->input) ne "")
{
#   $ob->write ($return);
 $return =~ s/[^0-9,]//g;
      print "$return\n";
      }
      else
      {
         print "ERROR!! Did not receive anything from Mate.\n";
         }
         
         undef $ob
Dell:~#

You need Device:::SerialPort installed

I commented some parts out because it was sending data that shut down the inverter. Beyond that I cannot really help you figure it out.

Good luck with it.

Tom