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Showing posts with the label solar mqtt OOYCYOO controller rs485

Turning a Local ADS-B Feed Into an Easy to Read Dashboard

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  Have you ever wondered where the plane or helicopter overhead is coming from, where it is going or who operates it? I found myself logging into my SkyAware monitor several times a week to look up that information. The problem was that it only showed what was overhead at that moment and logging in took a minute or two each time. I knew there had to be a better way to see this information quickly and to keep a historical record of all the aircraft traffic I had observed. One of the fun side effects of running a local ADS-B receiver with dump1090-fa on a Pi with an RTL-SDR dongle, is that you end up with a constant stream of aircraft telemetry sitting on your Pi. aircraft.json updates every second or two with hex codes, positions, altitudes, speeds and it's all there waiting to be analyzed and not just sent to Flightaware. Recently, I learned about JetClock which is a slick, commercial desk clock that shows you the aircraft passing overhead with airline, route, photos and all kinds ...

Turning a Cheap OOYCYOO MPPT Solar Controller into a Real Telemetry System

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  There’s a certain kind of frustration that comes with inexpensive hardware: it works, but it doesn’t tell you anything useful. That’s exactly where I found myself with an OOYCYOO MPPT solar charge controller. It was happily charging batteries, but beyond a tiny LCD panel, there was no meaningful way to monitor performance, integrate it into dashboards or understand what was actually happening over time. So instead of replacing it, I decided to listen to it. What came out of that experiment is a simple but surprisingly powerful approach: passively tapping the RS485 data stream, decoding the controller’s undocumented protocol and publishing clean telemetry into MQTT for Node-RED, Grafana or Home Assistant. Important Disclaimer – since you will be doing something experimental, follow the instructions carefully and I take no responsibility for any equipment you might damage. The Core Idea: Passive RS485 Monitoring Most people approach this kind of problem by trying to talk to the con...

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