Mini Dashboard ? - SolarPiKiosk

Hey Guys,

is it possible to create a mini dashboard - i have a 7" tft wired up to a pi, but the dash is a bit off, is there a good way to scale it or just add "specific" elements and remove the rest ?

My basic draft build guide - still needs a bit more adding..

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xdLdS2SoW2UD2D4F6Bvy7zpO4__-FB9X/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=109206190401302921149&rtpof=true&sd=true

TheWhiteDragon use home assistant, that will allow you to pick and choose what you want and can run on the Pi

Cdent I installed Home Assistant last week and it works great.

There is a learning curve but there’s lots of videos on YouTube on how to install and set it up, search for ‘speak to the geek’ for an excellent one on installing and configuring MQTT and GivTCP to read your inverter’s data

geoffreycoan Yep, Speak To The Geek's videos are very helpful in getting everything set up!

Looks good, but no direct integration with GivEnergy 😭
Guess that's why you guys use the mqtt, not sure if I can put a front-end on the same pi for the display though, OS looks fairly well locked down.. guess I need to do some reading to figure it out

TheWhiteDragon The GivTCP addon has a display you can access on a different port number, it can be turned on in the settings. Or you can build your own. Not entirely sure if you could run the display on the Pi itself or if you'd need another device to connect to the Pi to fetch the webpage.

It's not too hard to get the various bits up and running on the Pi, especially with Mr Geek's videos. MQTT was easy to setup, just don't choose a massively long password for GivTCP to access MQTT as it didn't like that. It can be a complicated password and doesn't need to be accessible from off the network, but can't be too long.

TheWhiteDragon I don’t know about using the Pi to drive a display as well, I have my home assistant installed on a virtual machine running under Windows 10 on a tiny PC I bought especially for the purpose.

However, what you can do in Home Assistant is to define dashboards to monitor and control your system, and then use the HA mobile app to access those dashboards. Could mount a tablet on the wall as a control device if you wanted.

cheers guys, struggling to build my dashboards with GivTCP - any chance of a screenshot of your Energy pages ? as I just don't seem to be able to find the right readings to generate anything meaningful..

For the energy dashboard, you need to add totals

So the ones ending
Battery Charge Energy Today kWh
… Discharge …
… Export …
… Import …
… PV …

However if you have a different price for import depending on the time of day, you’ll need to d something clever with “helpers”

Basically you need your own custom energy meter as an entity, which takes data from the GivEnergy Import Energy today kWh and has two or more tariff options setup against it

You then need an automation to switch the tariff at certain points.

Speak to the Geek has a video about this on YouTube.

Also, if your inverter ever gets replaced, you’ll loose all the historic data in the energy dashboard when you change the entities you display on it.

You might want to create helpers for every item you add to the energy dashboard, so you add the custom entity you’ve created to the dashboard rather than the real entity.

Apparently when the time comes, you can delete your custom entity and create it again with the exact same name, linking it to the new raw data, and it should keep all the history as well as show new data.

A bit of a faff to setup though, took me a few days to get it all working!

I think it’s best to create the custom entities towards the end of the day, e.g. when they all have a value above zero (e.g. 5kWh imported) as otherwise the custom entity doesn’t know what the units are and can’t be used on the dashboard.

TheWhiteDragon here's some screen shots of my energy dashboard and the utility meter setups behind it.
I have two gen 1 hybrid inverters so the charge, discharge and pv is all duplicated. I read the import and export from just one inverter.
Setup multi time utility meter as per the speak to the geek video

And here's the yaml for my flux automation that changes which time of day utility meter is used for each flux period

alias: "Flux Energy: Off-peak, Day and Peak Tariffs"
description: ""
trigger:

• platform: time
  at: input_datetime.flux_off_peak_energy_start
  variables:
  tariff: offpeak
• platform: time
  at: input_datetime.flux_off_peak_energy_end
  variables:
  tariff: day
• platform: time
  at: input_datetime.flux_peak_energy_start
  variables:
  tariff: peak
• platform: time
  at: input_datetime.flux_peak_energy_end
  variables:
  tariff: day
  action:
• service: select.select_option
  target:
  entity_id: select.grid_import_today
  data:
  option: "{{ tariff }}"
• service: select.select_option
  target:
  entity_id: select.export_today
  data:
  option: "{{ tariff }}"
  mode: single

cheers, looks like i have the essential bits running now, any hints/tips on some good setups addons - mines a bit basic.

geoffreycoan = whats the GivEnergy bit you have plugged into your sidebar ?

geoffreycoan
I "acquired" an unused pi4 from my son to run HA. I then bought a used one from ebay as a web viewer to output my dashboard onto an old Samsung TV screen in my utility room.
I think it would be possible to achieve what I have done with a single pi and somehow running HA in some sort of docker container (out of my depth now!!).

TheWhiteDragon whats the GivEnergy bit you have plugged into your sidebar ?

That’s a dashboard called ‘GivEnergy’ that I’ve been mucking around with different power flows, trying to decide the one I like. Its the embyronic of a home dashboard, but nothing decided yet.

At the moment it has:

• Powerflow Plus for my combined GE setup
• Individual Powerflow Plus for each inverter
• SoC charts for the two batteries
• Sunsynk power flow for just one inverter (v early trying this one out, still to decide whether to combine both inverters on one chart or have separate power flows)
• GivEnergy power flow

I quite like the Sunsynk because it has daily totals and ‘time remaining to 4% draindown’ but could probably get these through other widgets. Before I had that I liked the Powerflow plus, but with having two inverters that can be dong different things, having it all combined on one Powerflow can be confusing.

Still work in progress!

Automation of the daily flux discharge is supposed to be my priority not fiddling with powerflows

very cool, i have a SolarEdge inverter and a GivEnergy Inverter, but I haven't tried adding the SE one yet. not sure how to do that as I don't see it listed on my router, let alone how to deal with the data, I have optimisers so I should get a readout on each panel.

i have various old Pi units, i was hoping to use a RPI1 or piZero to run the screen but all the browsers minimum spec has rocketed up to a pi3.. so i have a Pi4 doing the screen and another Pi4 doing the HA, just need to design a box to print to hold all 3 parts in a decent way now lol

thanks for the info and advice.

TheWhiteDragon its a fun learning journey. I have my home assistant running on a Tiny PC I bought for the purpose as a virtual box VM running under Windows 10. Not sure this is the best solution or not. It has the advantage of being a PC so I can open multiple browser windows when fiddling with HA, but the disadvantage of the W10 overheads and then yesterday a load of WIndows updates meant I had to shut HA down to install and reboot.

I have a Growatt inverter as well with an older FIT array with no internet connectivity at all. Plan to get that integrated to HA as well, but am anticipating it’ll be a bit more challenging.

Just got automation of my Octopus flux peak period discharge working so feeling pleased with myself over that https://community.givenergy.cloud/d/2793-octopus-flux-timed-export-using-home-assistantgivtcp/18