Fronius-stats

• Simple Python script that fetches data from a predefined Fronius inverter and visualizes the production.
• Displays: timestamp, current production and how much has been produced during the (day, year and total production) so far.

Configure environment

• Use the docker_compose.yml to start and setup your InfluxDB and Grafana environments.
• Launch the environment with, for example, docker compose -f docker_compose.yml up -d

Setup InfluxDB

• Create a user with password, and a bucket to be used for saving the solar panel data.
• Create two APIs: 1) one for the Python script 2) one for Grafana. The script could have both read and write access rights, Grafana needs reading rights.

Setup Grafana

• Create a data source connection to InfluxDB.
• Choose Flux as the query language.
• Setup the http-connection: http://influxdb:8086.
• Setup to InfuxDB Details section: organization, Token and Default Bucket.
• Save and Test.
• You should have now a working connection to your InfluxDB and can start making visualizations.

Configuration settings

• By default the script uses a config file 'config.json', a template is here.
• Update config.json file with the relevant information from InfluxDB setup, ie. token, org and bucket.

Script execution

• Create a virtual environment

python3 -m venv test_env

• Activate the environment

source test_env/bin/activate

• Install the required packages

pip install -r requirements.txt

• Setup the infrastructure, like defined in Chapter "Configure environment". Currently the setup uses Grafana and InfluxDB, which are running in separate Docker environments.

• Run in terminal the following command

python3 fronius.py

• You should see something like this in the terminal:

Time: 09:07:45
Currently producing: 75 W
Setup utilization: 2 %

or

Time: 19:22:36
Not producing.

• You can also output the terminal output to a log file, for example:

python3 fronius.py > fronius.log

and get to the log file something like this:

Time: 19:20:00
Not producing.

• After script execution the data is fetched from the inverter and processed. In the terminal you will see a trimmed output and if everything is setup correctly you can find the same information from InfluxDB.

• If you don't wish to keep the virtual environment then deactivate it with the following command:

deactivate

Architecture

By default the script uses a config file 'config.json', a template is here.

Currently there are two configurations you need to define in the Fronius part: URL and maximum capacity. For the InfluxDB part you need to define: token, bucket and organization.

There's also a possibility to use a example response message in a Docker environment:

• The Dockerfile can be found from here.
• Example message message here.
• If you use the Docker environment the URL must be defined like your Docker environment has been started up. For example: http://localhost:8080/GetPowerFlowRealtimeData.fcgi.

Development

Development activities happen in development branches. Once the feature/fix/something is ready the change(s) are merged into main branch.

Next steps

• Improve the documentation
• Use created sample visualizations in premade config
• Create more sample configs
• Further improvements to the the script by using also other Fronius API endpoints