Remote Blues

Abroad on holiday and using WiFi to check up on my system. (PV, BATTERY, INVERTER)

Five days ago the Giv portal suddenly lacked any data. The next day it reappeared. The day after that it disappeared again and has not returned since.

The only change I can discern is that the number of charging and discharging slots available has increased to 10. I don’t use these at present but imagined it might be a software update. Otherwise, I haven’t a clue.

It’s probably fine, and my options are limited from Sardinia, but is there anything I can do to wake it up?

Speedy turn off your phone and enjoy your holiday!

stevelewis

Yes I know. But this level of anal retentiveness takes decades to acquire. I’ll try ….

Whenever I am away from home I run a Wireguard VPN server on a Raspberry PI so that I can access my local network from anywhere in the world as if I was at home on the Wifi. As a backup I also run a ZeroTier VPN network. So I can access my inverter locally using the app. The only wrinkle is my phone has to be on any random WiFi otherwise the app assumes it can't make Home connection and uses the Away mode. If I could force it to search for an inverter it would find one even though it is connected via 4G as the VPN makes all my home devices accessible to the phone.

I also have the benefit of being able to watch the BBC iPlayer when I am in another country as it is going via my home ADSL connection. It does mean I am limited to the upload bandwidth of my home connection, which is only about 7Mbps but that is fast enough for videos.

Thanks nophead.

I will investigate my VPN and see if that helps.

nophead thanks, I’ve setup WireGuard VPN now on the windows PC that I run my home assistant on so I’ve got the option of local access plus iPlayer should I need it.

WireGuard is available as an add-on to home assistant and I did consider that (watched a video on it) but decided I didn’t want to add more unnecessarily to the HA VM so would go down the windows native route. Setup is quite complex on windows but this utility streamlines it https://github.com/micahmo/WgServerforWindows

Logging in to home assistant via the vpn is a bit of a pain, neither homeassistant.local nor my duckdns host name work; had to use the 192.168 local IP address of the HA VM. Most of the time I’m going in remotely via the duckdns name without the vpn so this isn’t a major issue.

Thanks

I use duckdns to allow wireguard to connect to my home but after that home assistant is just a local network access, the same as at home, so just nextcloudpi.lan. I don't need to specify the IP address, although that would work. I assume my GoogleNest router at home acts as a DNS server for local devices and it works the same when accessed over VPN.

The wireguard server runs on the same Raspberry PI as HA, in a Docker container to keep it separate.