PeterGutti

@PeterGutti Have a look at the ICCSoftware website Help page for commands to upgrade Linux on RPi to latest, particularly if you have the RPi3. Perhaps that will get your communication to the computer going again. 

Hi everybody!  I'm impressed how people in this forum support each other! Hope i can give back something in the future.
Yes,, my cards looks exactly like the 2015 fotos in the pdf. I would be happy to buy one.  Will send PM with address.

Hi Bosvark
Page 10 of the manual.

So If you have newer firmware you would set program 38 to disable. Generator will start at the voltage specified in program 12 and stop at voltage specified in program 13. Being a 100kVA it is probably one of those fancy autostart units which will have an Aux start relay. If it is more mundane like my Lister engine you will need a timer on the relay (3-4 sec) so that there is not continuous power to the starter motor. The governor's solenoid will however need to be held closed until the engine needs to stop.

Hi all!
did i report to this forum that everything is working now?  After upgrading the firmware of the two Axperts 5KV the generator (red) connects to both Axperts and charges the batteries and at the same time feeds the loads (bypassing).  

Hi all!
did i report to this forum that everything is working now?  After upgrading the firmware of the two Axperts 5KV the generator (red) connects to both Axperts and charges the batteries and at the same time feeds the loads (bypassing).  

Hi @PeterGutti, There is no need for transferring money to my bank account but thank you for the kind offer. We are after all just trying to help one another and not duplicate the great amount of effort needed to optimise out systems.
The function of BMV parameter 2 is to determine when the batteries are charged and then switch the charger to the battery float voltage. Victron explained it as follows in an e-mail reply to a question from me. When you have a steady current such as a generator or the grid, one would set parameter 2 to the float voltage minus 0.2V to 0.3V. Three conditions have to be met for switching to float, the setting of parameter 2 and the tail current (parameter 3). Both these have to be valid for the charged detection time (parameter 4). When charging from solar it is possible that cloud cover for instance could result in a charge current equal to the tail current and a voltage equal to the setting of parameter 2, all for the detection time before the batteries have reached the fully charged voltage. Victron recommended that, when using solar panels, parameter 2 be set to the charged voltage minus 0.2V to 0.3V. This will ensure that the charged voltage is reached before the BMW switches the charger to float voltage. @Don refined his setting further by setting the tail current to a small value 0.5 x AH and he also increased the charged detection time to 50 minutes as far as I remember.
If I had your batteries, which seems to be really outstanding, I would be inclined to use the settings as described in the manual with the Victron recommendations for solar applied. After all according to the manual one could charge at 54V which is also the float voltage. The higher voltage of 56.4V will just optimise charging from solar panels.
As far as the USB to Serial device detected by lsusb, I wonder if it might perhaps be the Victron USB converter that is detected.

Hi @PeterGutti, A few day ago I read this thread again and Googled your OPvZ batteries. The recommendations for charging you batteries, according to the user manual follow.
1.4 Recharging : The PowerSafe® OPzV battery should be recharged by using a unique floating and recharge voltage at 2.23-2.25 V/cell at 20°C. No current limitation is required in the majority of application cases. If the PowerSafe OPzV battery has to be charged more quickly, a recharge voltage of 2.35 volts (boost charge) per cell can be used with current limited to 0.4C10
So if you recharge at 2.35V per cell, the Axpert parameter 26 should be set at 56.4V which would be safe as you are hardly likely to ever charge at 0.4C10 which would be 600A for your 1500AH battery bank. Charging at a higher voltage will probably damage your batteries, at least according to the manual. You could set the floating voltage at 2.25V per cell which means parameter 27 should be set to 54V. 
Your BMV parameter 2 should, according to the BMV manual, be set to the float voltage minus 0.2V or 0.3V which is 53.8V or 53.7V. However in correspondence I had with Victron, they recommended setting this parameter to the bulk charge voltage minus 0.2V in the case of solar installations where the charge current may vary quite a bit. If you set the Axpert parameter 26 at 56.4V, this would mean setting parameter 2 on the BMV at 56.2V. I have the Axpert V72.70B firmware installed and have set the new parameter 32 at 180 minutes. This keeps the charge voltage at my bulk charge voltage for that time before it drops to float because my Trojan batteries requires a higher bulk charge voltage than what the Axpert can supply.
I hope this helps in arriving at the optimal settings for your batteries.

Really big-ass capacitors. Those 63V jobbies we keep on harping about.
I once removed my Multi from the wall, loaded it into my car, drove it halfway across town, unloaded, by this time over half-an-hour later, and when we accidentally touched the two terminals together... there was still enough left in the caps for a spark!
See the same thing with my makeshift power supply (laptop brick plus a buck/boost converter) when powering the beaglebone or Rpi... you can unplug it from the wall and the computer will keep running for a good 5 seconds after that.

Must be the temperature: right now its 65° !!  And it makes sense as the running period gets shorter while the outside temperture rises. And... its placed below the Inverter, may be hot air is blown out if it..  Will fix this first.
Many thanks!
Peter
 

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.

REXX?  ... is a scripting language available for many OSs, also for Linux and Raspian. I tried to modify the autostart script that come with aicc.  Yes, i tried!  with no success. So i searched and installed REXX.
This is now my ICC start script:
#!/usr/bin/rexx trace 'o' /* started by autorun: in pi/.config/lxsession/LSDE-pi/autostart */ dir = '/home/pi/AICC' log = dir'/RunAICC.log' start_time = time('E') /* start stop watch */ logt = 'ICC started at' date() time() call lineout log, logt /* write to log */ say logt rc=chdir(dir) /*go to aicc directory and start aicc*/ address cmd './ICC' /* start app */ /* calc run duration hrs min */ duration = time(R) /* read stop watch */ hours = duration%3600 /* get hrs only */ minutes = (duration//3600) % 60 /* from rest calc mins */ logt = 'ICC ended at' date() time() '- duration:' hours'hrs' minutes'min' say logt /* say to console */ call lineout log, logt call lineout log, '- - - - - - -' Log file sample:
ICC started at 14 Feb 2017 18:42:01 ICC ended at 14 Feb 2017 18:42:01 - duration: 15hrs 51min Isn't it nice and easy to read?  Rexx is typeless, all conversions are done at the time its needed - Automatically.  
---------------- 
So far - so good.  I tried to autostart this script by adding it to pi/.config/lxsession/LSDE-pi/autostart.  That did not work. Is there no tool/gui that helps to configure autostart of programs?  There also must be a list of programs that already start automatically.. 

I disagree. Gas is not cheaper than electricity. Might as well leave it on the Eskom side.
With that bombshell out of the way: I do recommend that people install gas stoves but for different reasons, those reasons being that it is very nice to cook on gas, you can cook when the power is out, and the carbon foot print of burning LPG is lower compared to coal plus all the transmission losses. But it is not cheaper, which means there is no ROI, it is strictly a luxury thing.
The reason why it is not cheaper is because a kg of lpg has 53.6MJ of energy per kg, which is just short of 15kwh (divide by 3600, a watt is a joule per second), so a 9kg bottle contains the equivalent of 130kwh of electricity. It costs around R190 to refill a 9kg, so the per-unit cost is around R1.46 per kwh. On the face of it that looks good (it is significantly less than CoCT rates for example), but keep in mind that the efficiency (how much makes it into the food you're cooking) is significantly less than for an electrical heating element (assuming a flat utensil of the right size and all that), so the true cost of LPG is actually slightly more than for electricity (when cooking).
It isn't so much that people notice though, in fact it is so close that most people believe it is cheaper.
So I would not convert to gas unless I had the money for the luxury or frequent power failures. Barring those, I'd just move it to the Eskom side.
This is an opinion though, let me just stress that. Gas is an important part of the overall strategy, but not a prerequisite :-)

A happy day today: After upgrading the Inverters to level 72.40 (i bought an old HP Powerbook for that) the generator now gets connected!  The installer would was surprised as he already had a 600€ charger brougth with him.  This is now saved money!
One little problem i had: Because Watchpower starts automatically the com port was somehow locked for the upgrade program. So i had to reboot several times. 
After re-configuring (as the parameters got lost) all worked fine.
Thank you all for the hints and tips i got from this forum.

A happy day today: After upgrading the Inverters to level 72.40 (i bought an old HP Powerbook for that) the generator now gets connected!  The installer would was surprised as he already had a 600€ charger brougth with him.  This is now saved money!
One little problem i had: Because Watchpower starts automatically the com port was somehow locked for the upgrade program. So i had to reboot several times. 
After re-configuring (as the parameters got lost) all worked fine.
Thank you all for the hints and tips i got from this forum.

A happy day today: After upgrading the Inverters to level 72.40 (i bought an old HP Powerbook for that) the generator now gets connected!  The installer would was surprised as he already had a 600€ charger brougth with him.  This is now saved money!
One little problem i had: Because Watchpower starts automatically the com port was somehow locked for the upgrade program. So i had to reboot several times. 
After re-configuring (as the parameters got lost) all worked fine.
Thank you all for the hints and tips i got from this forum.

A happy day today: After upgrading the Inverters to level 72.40 (i bought an old HP Powerbook for that) the generator now gets connected!  The installer would was surprised as he already had a 600€ charger brougth with him.  This is now saved money!
One little problem i had: Because Watchpower starts automatically the com port was somehow locked for the upgrade program. So i had to reboot several times. 
After re-configuring (as the parameters got lost) all worked fine.
Thank you all for the hints and tips i got from this forum.

A happy day today: After upgrading the Inverters to level 72.40 (i bought an old HP Powerbook for that) the generator now gets connected!  The installer would was surprised as he already had a 600€ charger brougth with him.  This is now saved money!
One little problem i had: Because Watchpower starts automatically the com port was somehow locked for the upgrade program. So i had to reboot several times. 
After re-configuring (as the parameters got lost) all worked fine.
Thank you all for the hints and tips i got from this forum.

Other people have done the upgrade and reported that their generators did indeed work on the inverter. Him not being able to do the upgrade doesn't mean it won't work. 

After having a look at your photo an reading your pdf I noticed that you had setting 1 on SBU, meaning that the inverter will take power from SOLAR, BATTERY then UTILITY, in that order.
If you set it to UTI it will accept utility power as priority and only use battery and solar when utility is not available.
This would explain why the inverter is seeing the AC but not accepting it, it's running from solar.
When the solar is disconnected or not generating (at night) the inverter will accept UTILITY to charge batteries and supply the load.
Try changing setting 1 to UTI and see if it helps
 

#jdp: there is no "solved" status.  I simply cold no know that this is not valid anymore