Stores solar data in a database to view on Android, Grafana, or PVOutput

Supported Products • Quickstart • Features • Supported Databases • Examples

Supported Products

Outback MATEs (FX Inverter, MX/FM Charge Controller)
Renogy Rover (And other Renogy products) over modbus serial.
- Includes Rover, Rover Elite, Wanderer, Adventurer, Dual Input DCDC Charger, and possibly others
  - Should include Rover Boost once released
- Compatible with all SRNE Solar Charge Controllers (And rebranded products)
- Compatible with Zenith Grape Solar Charge Controller, PowMr MPPT Charge Controller, RICH SOLAR MPPT, WindyNations TrakMax MPPT

Quickstart

Ready to install? Use the Quickstart!

Features

Supports multiple types of solar products.
Runs reliably 24-7. Recovers from connection errors and has verbose logging features.
Fully customizable through JSON (No programming experience required).
Supports CouchDB, InfluxDB, local JSON file, and PVOutput exporting.
Can report Raspberry Pi CPU temperature.
Easy setup on Linux. Runs without root.

Supported Databases

CouchDB
- Allows for SolarThing Android and SolarThing Web to function
- Used for PVOutput data collection
GraphQL
- Allows use of CouchDB SolarThing data with Grafana
- Supplements the CouchDB database
InfluxDB
- Simplest to set up with Grafana
PVOutput.org
- Allows for viewing of data on pvoutput.org
- Requires CouchDB to be set up
- Enables usage of the PVOutput Mycroft skill
REST API
- With the "post" database, all packets can be posted to a URL endpoint, useful for REST APIs

Examples

PVOutput Wild Mountain Farms: PVOutput System and PVOutput SolarThing Teams

SolarThing Android: Github | Google Play

SolarThing Android displays data in a persistent notification that updates at a configurable rate

You can get data in Grafana via InfluxDB or via CouchDB+SolarThing GraphQL.

Grafana is very customizable. Rearrange graphs and make it how you want!

SolarThing Web (Mostly abandon at this point)

SolarThing web uses CouchDB as its database.

Can I run this?

Of course! This runs on Java 8+ and has been tested to work with Java 8 and Java 11. This runs on Linux, Windows and Mac, but is easiest to set up on Linux systems running Debian with systemd (such as the default Raspberry Pi OS or Ubuntu).

The quickstart can help you get SolarThing up and running.

Usage at Wild Mountain Farms

We monitor an Outback MATE2 with a Raspberry Pi 1 and a Renogy Rover charge controller with a Raspberry Pi Zero W. Both SolarThing instances upload data to CouchDB, hosted on the computer also hosting Grafana and SolarThing Web. This computer also gets data from CouchDB and uploads it to PVOutput using the pvoutput-upload program.

We used to also use InfluxDB for allowing easy displaying of data on Grafana, but we now use CouchDB and SolarThing GraphQL for that.

Using the program

You can see the Outback/Renogy Rover README for using the program with outback or renogy products.

The input and output README is documentation for the io JSON property option used in the rover and mate programs.

Database Setup

CouchDB setup
- Used for SolarThing Android, SolarThing Web, and SolarThing GraphQL (which gets data to Grafana)
InfluxDB 2.0 setup
- Used for direct Grafana queries

Developer Use

Contributing

Technical

Project Structure

History

Google Analytics

Updating

Configuration

This uses all JSON for configuring everything. The files you edit are all in one place unless you decide to move them.

See Quickstart to see how to set them up

Renogy Rover Monitoring Alternatives

Don't like something about SolarThing? Here are some alternatives to monitor your Renogy Rover.

Suggestions?

If you have suggestions on how to improve the documentation or have a feature request, I'd love to hear from you! SolarThing Issues

If you get confused while trying to configure solarthing, that's probably because the documentation is always a work in progress. If you find something confusing, please report it, so I can make it clearer.