What if the WiFi dongle fails?

Just looking ahead at what would happen if the dongle ever failed. Would the system useless and uncontrollable? Could another dongle be set up and used in its place? Is it worth buying a spare now before they are unobtainable?

I bought a spare online for about £40. Set it up and got it all working and then put it bag in the back and left it on top of the inverter. I think you just have to copy the text file from the old dongle to the new

I built my own dongle should they become unobtainable

hoggy
Is there a way to build a LAN port for a Gen1?

SteveCook I would assume that the setup above could adapted by using the LAN port.

TBH I wasn't really sure if the dongle was just for WiFi or whether it was doing more stuff to control the inverter. I assume from the above pic it's just WiFi.

hoggy Can you share details of what you've done here? Is it using USB to WiFi bridge mode of some sort?

SteveCook might get one just in case.

SteveCook it could be done using the existing dongle and some soldering although I've never actually done it.

My way removes dongle entirely out the equation so you lose the official portal (although I guess if I could be bothered I can mimic that but seems a waste of effort right now) but it's not a simple bridge there's a few things that need to emulated and 'just so'

So I now talk directly to the inverter itself - the benefit of this being you are not hamstrung with the dongle being bogged down so you can reliably hammer out 5 seconds updates no bother (this one's been running for several months fine)
The crux is I did it on a Pi zero 2 because I had a spare one - the problem being these are nearly impossible to source - so I'm about 90% through porting to ESP32 instead. After that's sorted I'd then shift to ESP32-P4 for ethernet.

As I've now got this out in the open my little social experiment about things like this also begins - so I'll start the timer at 14:55 on 30/06/2026. I'll explain what I'm on about when it happens.

hoggy
Sounds fantastic, but about 10ft over over my head.

SteveCook long story short - it works, but the thing it works on is either impossible to buy or more expensive than buying two spare dongles.
I'm therefore re writing it onto something cheaper and more readily available.

hoggy Pi Zero?

wrighar zero 2 W in that pic. Not sure I can pull the same trick on Pi Zero 1 as the usb controller is different