Sidewinder

Hi all Pi users, Anybody experience strange behavior this morning around 9-10. Pi rebooted, ICC recovered 100%, no problem there. What I noticed is that the alert that a new version (2.1.3) is gone now. I am still on 2.1.0. "Running latest version" I can trace a few grid dips just after 9 this morning, which EmonCMS captured. I have a 10Ah mini "UPS" feeding the Pi with power, so am not suspecting a pi power outage to have caused this. After an hour I got the alert from PVoutput regarding this, and started digging. A "Stop/Start" of ICC didn't bring the pvoutput thread alive, so did a click on the ICC close icon (x - top right) and a few minutes later pvoutput was alive again. Strange?

Jako, No, the Pi, specially the 3, cannot be powered by the Axpert USB port, simply because it requires much more amps than the standard 500mA a USB port can deliver. Minimum 2-2.5A PSU, else the pi will give you problems.

My bad on the Calcium vs Crystal. Please share your Inverter 's S/W version. You may have a different version that mine. (73.40, AFAIK)

Rickyv, Setting 1 = Priority. Should be UTi (Utility First) Was UEI a typo?. If you select this, then Setting 12 & 13 becomes ineffective. (The V point when switching happens back and forth). In my view, you are between a rock and a very hard/expensive place here. In order to get setting 12 & 13 to be effective, you need setting 1 to be SOL or SBU. This means you run on batteries with Utility as backup. You want to run it the other way, which is setting 1 = UTi, and that leave you with Setting 29 = Low DC Voltage Cut-off. Set this to between 42 - 48 V, depending on how deep you want to cycle your batteries when Utility is out. Just remember, the lower you go, the more life (cycles) you take out of your batteries. Typically, With SoC @ 80%, you can get approx 1-2000 cycles out of a good set of batteries, but at 30% SoC, the same batteries will only give you closer to 200 - 300 cycles. Big difference. Food for thought! Setting 2: = Max Solar Charge. Rule of thumb here is 10% of your bat bank's capacity should be the charging current. In you case 10% of 105Ah is roughly 10A. 60A is way too high, and not recommended for long term survival of your batteries. Not critical now, as you don't have panels yet. Use the next setting up from that, which is 20A. Setting 5 = Battery Type. I would use the USE setting. Specially if the default FLD setting don't match your Lead Crystal Batteries. Once you set this to USE, you now have to set the following as well: Setting 26 = Bulk Charge Voltage. This value is from your battery spec sheet. You need to multiply this by 8 (8 batteries in series). But for first pass 58.4 is OK. Setting 27 = Float Charge Voltage. Get form spec sheet. Same procedure as Setting 26 (x8). 54V looks OK, but tweak these two setting as per spec sheet. Setting 11 = Max Utility Charge. See Setting 2. Setup mine at 2A. So you can go anything between 2A - 20A. Depends on how fast you want the batteries to be full again before the next cycle. Some free advise. You may have read this on PF already. The Expert will not protect your batteries properly, so get a BMV700/702 to do this properly. The Axpert's SoC value are way off, and you cannot use it to protect your batteries. The next thing is to get/run ICC. This software can be setup to switch according to the BMV, plus then you will know/measure exactly what is going. But Rome wasn't build in a day, so plan, save and install the correct goodies to protect your investment, otherwise you may end up with a lemon...

Hi Richyv, The user manual will tell you, but in essence, Batteries on first, after axpert starts, takes quite a few seconds, then switch on Grid, then switch on load lastly. Switch off is the reverse. After Axpert has started up, you can start by adjusting your individual parameter. Hope this helps. Others please feel free to add/amend.

Maxomill, From Google: Emoncms is a powerful open-source web-app for processing, logging and visualising energy, temperature and other environmental data. If you run an Axpert, one should also install ICC to control the Inverter, as it's poor SoC calc is legio. You can read many articles here on PF. (Specially ones on the BMV) Now if you run ICC, three little add-on to that is EMONCMS, MQTT & Node-Red. So EMONCMS enables you to report on all parameters of the Axpert. No need to "publish" or log to cloud service, just run the server as localhost. The Gridpower graph above was created in matter of seconds, as I did not have such a report before reading this posts. MQTT is a message broker, so you can exchange parameters to other devices, using a Node-Red program to control the actions. I can get the Pi temp and uptime report to my smartphone, by subscribing to my feeds on the pi (sitting behind firewall on private network) So, if you go to Manie's website (www.iccsoftware.co.za), and look at the download section, you will see some of these option for download. For newbies, I recommend to just download the complete image, which contains all the items mentioned here, in one package, thus no need to install and configure each item individually. One can test ICC for a month with a trial key, before buying the software for Windows or Pi (linux). PS, I don't get commission from Manie, but I highly recommend his software, specially on the Axpert models. I have a Infini now, and still use ICC for its overall ability to tell me what is /and has been going on on the system. So one of my projects for the future would be to get an alert when ESKOM goes down/up. Shouldn't be too difficult, just needs some time.

So, had a look at my EmonCMS, and found the outage. However, it started on Friday @ 10h10 till 11h20. Not quite what ESKOM said.

I received a SMS notification from Eskom (nogal) the other day (27th June) to advise of a power outage in Midrand Area from 22h00 till 06h00 the next morning for maintenance. I never noticed the switching, as I'm on a Infini, so I missed the whole thing

Maxomill, Yes it does. I have installed it on W7, but never used it.

DC is not AC?

All sorted now. I did it slightly different this time. Normally you don't want to tamper/upgrade a file that is currently running. So i killed the ICC process. Clicked the upgrade button. This time a new ICC file appeared. Then "sudo chmod 755 ICC" again, to set the permission correct, and ICC started automatically with V2.1.0

So I had another look. New files that appeared are: (dated the time of upgrade) heap.trc size=0 restart.txt size=11898601 Not 100% sure what these are for. Also 5 new directories appeared, nl. W32APLHA, W32MIPS,W32PPC,W32X86 & x64, dated Jan 8 ?

So 2 further upgrades appeared. A few days ago V2.0.9 appeared and yesterday (may earlier) V2.1.0. So hit the upgrade button and left it alone. ICC restarted all by itself (an improvement!) So now ICC tells me I'm running the latest, yet displays ver 2.0.7 bottom left of the Dashboard screen. If I look at my ICC folder, I can't see the new version files anywhere. Anyone else experience this?

After reading this post, my first reaction was to regret pulling the trigger so fast on the Infini V 5kW. Compared to the 4kW Axpert, I like the fact that i can, for 99% of the time, run my household without having to play Power Police - doing things in parallel like in the old days, and not serially. Yesterday - a washing day, we used the washing machine, dish washer and geyser on at the same time, plus a 500W panel heater. For the first time in 5 weeks since installation, I heard the unfamiliar (now) beep beep to signal overload. ICC was showing almost 7kW draw!. Sure, the new plus 4 kW is less expensive, but buying two at the same time is a stretch. So, my recommendation for a family of four with mild "green" tendencies, one can cope with a V 5kW (with a non split DB For a larger or more normal family, a dual Super 4kW would be super. What I liked about going for a 4 kW setup first, is that it made all the occupants of the house power aware, so the behavior is now entrenched!

I used an Axpert 5kVA for 6 months or so, and the delta was always around 70W. Having upgraded to Infini a month ago, I see Load Watts = Grid Watts, meaning self consumption is 0W. Knowing that is is should be closer to 70W or more. Hopefully this is something that Manie can fix in ICC, but I would not have expected it to be 0W - the Infini is supposed to be based on Axpert to a large degree.

It is available for testing from http://www.iccsoftware.co.za.

Another option. Try and see if the RS232 port is alive. Run the factory software on PC and connect with RS232 cable. Your PC needs to have an RS232 port. Else you need a USB to RS232 cable combo. Do not use USB and RS232 at the same time. I've done that and got big numbers on EMON. One at a time!.If the RS232 is OK, and is seems the USB is kaput, then the new ICC ver 2 (now @ 2.0.7) has a new setting where you can choose either USB or Serial. I have not seen these boards other than the parallel one for sale. Not that I have been looking :-)

Peter, When I power down my Axpert 5kVA (Manufacture Early 2016), it dies immediately (well can't really say how long, but i'd say seconds, never more than a few). Since upgrading to InfiniSolar, my Axpert is dormant, so overloading is something of the past! My Axpert has both, USB & RS232 ports. And if I remember correctly, these interfaces are on removable daughter boards, just like the parallel board. Maybe you can "migrate/move" the board to the other Axpert or visa-versa?

top command on my Pi3 with ICC 2.0.7 says load average 0.15 0.20 0.19 => i've seen it as low as 0.05 174 tasks, 1 running.

Upgraded to 2.0.7 this morning. This version was specially build to accommodate the Infinisolar V 5kW Dual MPPT Inverter - and hopefully other Inifini's with dual MPPT's. Working perfectly in all respects. Thanks Manie for such excellent service! As per @kg666, if you are using the emoncms graphs etc, please update all node1 to node0. Just add from the Input page to your feeds page. Then updated each element.

Agreed, even 65% is not very hot for a Pi3, However, the higher the temps go, the CPU automatically starts cutting the clockspeed, because the slower the CPU runs, the less heat it generates. Sort of automatic throttling. With the two supplied heat sinks mine is running around 44C. A small computer ventilation fan to draw out stale (battery gasses) air should drop that by a few degrees.

Frits, If you look under icc settings, there is a dropdown for Inverter selection. You need to STOP ICC.., then the dropdown will become active. It will show the list of inverters supported.

Peter, My experience with ICC is that inherently it is stable. (since Jan 2017) Maybe look at the following: Pi Temperature. The hotter it runs, slows down VNC service, to the point where it fails. Pi's (3) running hot is well documented. Heatsinks and ventilation to solve. Check that temps stay below 55 deg. If on Wifi, check throughput on Wifi. The better the signal, the better. If on cable, check cabling and wifi router. My POE injector sometimes looses connection to the wifi router and i need to reseat the LAN cable. Check the USB cable. It does happen that the stream from the Axpert stops for no reason/ time period. To solve, you need to unplug the USB and plug again at the Axpert. Also look at how did you build your icc software. via image or manually. I think the IMAGE is better as it reduces risk of things going wrong or unsure as we are not all linux/ pi fundis.eg check that all processes (ps -ef) are running. Hope you get to the bottom of this.

I saw more or less the same happen to me on Sunday afternoon. I trying to completely setup my Infini, I thought that the settings from the LCD is only a few of the basic setting that is required to get it working. I loaded the factory CD software and connected it to the Inverter with a RS232 cable. I forgot to unplug the USB, so for the next day, I would get 0V input from Grid reported on ICC Tread Info, Emoncms etc.The main thing was that the Load Watts was hovering around -29699W! Reboot of Pi brought things under control. I'll try again this weekend without USB cable!

So I was curious, seeing 2.0.5 appeared yesterday. So I checked this morning, and ICC 2.0.4 reported that 2.0.6 is available. So Manie either doesn't sleep, or doesn't enjoy weekends of leisure! So I hit the "Upgrade" button. (Previously, downloaded and installed ICC manually) The progress bar to the right steadily crept from 0 and eventually stopped at "98 from [0-100](99%). I SSH'ed into the Pi, and a two new files appeared. 1) ICC.bak, which is your old ICC's backup (in case you want to roll back) 2) ICC.Upgrade The new file. If you were VNC'ed into the Pi, you would have seen the terminal window spitting out errors. Firstly, a "ICC file not found" type of error. This can quickly be fixed by issuing command "cp ICC.Upgrade ICC" Then my terminal window started complaining something about "permissions" To fix this I typed "sudo chmod 755 ICC" (these instructions are in the original install text file in the zip file) Bobs you uncle, IC started up automatically and 2.0.6 was alive.