Nodered and Home Assistant to manage your solar system

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Here's a very short demonstration of what you can create with Nodered and Home Assistant without knowing how to program. Yes, it's real ! :innocent:
This video is mainly intended for the Nodered and HA-CF forums, who helped me a lot in the making of this software.

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At first - I thought you'd got NodeRED to control THE solar system :slight_smile:

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That will be coming in V4 I believe, but will require root privileges to run correctly

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Evrything is controlled by nodered.
All communications are via flows and serial or tcp nodes.
Home assistant has been added, because with it, users can create their own scenarios. They can control when to recharge their electric car, or change a parameter in the inverter according to the power supplied or the brightness. The marriage of the two is obvious to me.
If you want the graphics to be just the way you want them, HA is equipped for that.
Battery management is a big hit, because batteries are widely sold around the world.

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I think you say the graphs are Grafana?

Is Grafana built-in to HomeAssistant?
I know we can use it with Node-red but it (and the database to feed it) have to be installed seperately.

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In my case, I used a grafana add-on directly managed by home assistant. As well as influxdb.
These modules are nothing more than docker containers.

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Your system looks fine, we need something like this for our hardware. Maybe would need some modifications
h.langer@mel-lop.com

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The system has evolved considerably since this topic began.
Still supported by Node Red.

There is now jk-bms management via rs485 Modbus, as well as a brand new module that will be released very soon.

It should enable data exchange between HA and the Net-cloud. All this without the need for a VPN, reverse proxy, or other tools. Communications will be encrypted. 4G connection planned. Client with esp32, PC, PLCs, etc.

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It's ready.
This is the very first functional version of the synchronization module for Home Assistant entities exported to an MQTT cloud broker and, conversely, an isolated client that can send topics to this broker. This will trigger the automatic creation of entities in Home Assistant.
All you need to do is send an auto-discovery topic and a status topic.
Communications are TLS-encrypted.

For example, an ESP32 that manages sensors and actuators in a second home can send its information to your Home Assistant at home via its built-in 4G connection. No other physical architecture is required.

Another case: one or more PLC Schneider devices by exemple (which use MQTT) can easily send their data externally.
I don't yet know if this is feasible in practice.

Basically, any MQTT client can send its values to the cloud and then simply used in HA for storage in the DB and creation of graphs, automations, or other utilities

On the same GitHub, there is also the module for managing wired jk-bms.

All this is made possible by the magical tool that is Node-RED.

I confirm, I am not a developer. I would say I am more of an assembler, if that job exists :sweat_smile:

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You can find more info about SCH and MQTT in MQTT Handling Example Guide :wink:

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They're not being nice to me this morning at Schneider's. -->
You don't have permission to access "http://product-help.schneider-electric.com...... :sweat_smile:

Indeed, I saw this on these virtual machines:

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Oops! Try the link I sent — I can open it without any problem.

Anyway, I can't help you much; I haven't tested it yet. That said, other PLCs (like Siemens, Beckhoff, etc.) have options to do it easily.

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I know that node-red is powerful, but “managing a solar system” is quite a feat!

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Oh yes, it's complex. There are so many brands and parameters to consider. These monitoring tools are welcome so that we're not flying blind.
Especially when there's zero injection on the grid. In that case, you have to use the production potential to efficiently divert it to, for example, your car battery or electric water heater.

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I wonder if this synchronization system could be of interest to the industrial sector🤔

It may not be expensive enough to be credible.

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I can assure it is, we implement something "similar" in our industrial machines.

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Very interesting.
Is it to connect production plants or simply to monitor process values from anywhere? It nicely and easily complements the existing SCADA systems. Have you implemented a private cloud broker or are you using the current offering?

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Its more about this. We can easily get data (Product data like Press curves, camera checks, sensor values, many more, and machine data like alarms, times, consumptions,... ) from almost all PLC vendors on the market. Then we can analize that data and detect trends, predict maintenance or simply store product traceability.

Its all in our side server.

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Hello @aitor,

I will soon be posting a video on my YouTube channel explaining how this MQTT Cloud Synchronizer add-on works.
There will be three scenarios.

1- A PC running Node Red sends its topics to the cloud, and they are automatically created in HAOS.
With a demo of changing values.

2- A geographically distant esp32-4g will also do this, but we will add the On/Off action of a relay connected to the esp32 with LED, and I will modify the relay remotely from my local web page. The status of the relay will be reported back for verification.

3- A PLC that would do the same thing.
Except that I don't have the PLC.
So if you agree, you could participate in this part, if you have access to a demo PLC. It would be a nice and important part of the demonstration.

So if you're interested, I'd be delighted.

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