So (a long) while back I mentioned I was working on a little home display for my Givenergy inverters.
I think it's finally about there so should anyone else want to do the same I've tried to make this as simple and cheap as possible. Aka:
But because the bones of ESP32 support was there I kind of went in a few directions whilst trying to maintain a very simple onboarding process "anyone" could use. So along with the screen version there is:
1: A Waveshare ESP32 GEEK Version - Which you can source one of those here
Which looks like this:
2: The Screen Version - Based on the Guition 4" Square Touch Which you can source one of those here
3: The "Cheapo" version - that basically runs on pretty much any ESP32-S3 you can find, providing it has at least 2MB of PSRAM and 8MB of storage.
For example i have this running find off one that cost about £7 on Amazon.
NOTE: S3 variant (that part is important, it won't work on the deceptively similar "C3" variant so don't try those) - and as you'll see shortly, it does need a couple of key things in regards to needing PSRAM.
So it started out as a simple micro-python version of essentially the already well trodden Givenergy_Modbus library. But as I'm quite boring, I kind of wanted to see just how far I could push these little cheap devices (remember they are only 2 cores running at 240Mhz, 512kB of fast SRAM and then anywhere from 0 to 8MB or slow PSRAM and some basic storage (usually 8-16MB)
What you now end up with is:
Captive Wifi Setup, A full webserver, a full web dashboard, a scheduler, an API, MQQT, OTA Updates, Historian with SD Card Support, a screen** and a full blown touchscreen interface** including settings changes, quick settings, charts etc...
*only on GEEK & Guition boards currently
**Small screen on the GEEK
***Guition Full touchscreen
Was quite surprised how much it's possible to cram in there so I'm basically going to keep going until things start to fall over.
Anyway, if you'd like to give it a try I've built a flash tool (Windows only currently) which will auto detect the board type and suitability and flash it all for you. All you have to do is plug the device in and off you go (in theory, this is all very new so let me know when/if things don't work.)
Flash tool looks like this: and can be found here however as it's new you will get popups asking if you trust it or not. That's entirely up to you.
There is also a demo dashboard here: https://terralync.terravolt.co.uk/demo/
(And yes the rest of the website is done by Ai & yes I hate it too - but if I don't use it to speed things up it'll be January before anyone sees it...)
Finally as a little bonus - if you get the small GEEK version running, you can enjoy USB mode which basically means should you choose, you can remove your dongle entirely, shove this in, enable "USB Turbo mode" and push much faster updates than the dongle can (5 seconds no bother)
You will obviously lose the Givenergy portal while the dongle is removed but it's might be a handy thing to have available should the need arise. I've tried it in Gen 1, 2 & 3 Inverters.
