|
|
inverter data blackout Friday, June 7 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Today Gretchen and I would be driving together with the dogs up to the cabin. We got a fairly early start, which means we left before noon. But on the way to the Thruway we stopped at the Hurley vet to have Charlotte's right front paw looked at. Sometimes she puts weight on it and sometimes she bounds around like a three-legger. We'd noticed it was a bit swollen but not noticeably warmer than her other paws. It had been bothering her for about a week. To get a slot at the vet, we had to pay a $150 emergency surcharge, but it was worth it not to have to worry about what might be wrong with Charlotte's paw all weekend at the cabin.
Initially the vet didn't notice anything obviously wrong with Charlotte's paw except swelling. But then she felt a swollen lymph node in Charlotte's right armpit, suggesting the problem was an infection. And then she found a small puncture wound in one of her paw pads. This seemed to explain everything, so she wrote us a prescription for an antibiotic and a pain killer.
As we drove through Broome Township, I had an increasingly urgent need to piss, so we stopped at the Franklinton Vlaie Wildlife Management Area's southmost parking area. We then went for a stroll down a path through a field of long grass punctuated with thousands of buttercups. As we passed through a narrow patch of woods, Gretchen remarked at the fragrance, which I thought was coming from multiflora rose. An approaching thunderstorm caused us to abort our brief nature walk.
As usual, I dropped off Gretchen and Charlotte (though this time not Neville, who walks too slowly) on Woodworth Lake Road about a mile before the cabin so they could get in a walk. When I arrived at the cabin, conditions were surprisingly cool for this time of year, with temperatures in the low 60s. It was warmer inside the cabin, which contained heat from earlier in the week.
It wasn't long after Gretchen and Charlotte got back to the cabin that she saw the sugar maple stool I'd carved out of a single block of wood using a chainsaw. (I'd only told her that I'd made something for her and that it would be a surprise.) She seemed happy with its æsthetics, though I'd feared that it might be a bit too "rustic" for her tastes. In looking at it, she couldn't quite figure out how I'd managed to produce the shelf in amongst the legs a third of the way from the top. I explained that to make the necessary voids I'd had to plunge the tip of the saw into the wood.
I eventually turned my attention to the big problem I needed to solve: why was there no data from the SolArk inverter showing up on the PowerView page that is suppose to display it. (Since it wasn't showing up there, it also was failing to make it to my remote control system, where it was needed to affect automation decisions.) I went down to the basement to see if perhaps the WiFi dongle, which I'd removed from its plastic housing and pushed up into its DB9 connector without the usual screws, had somehow fallen out. But it was still plugged in and the data flowing from it seemed normal. I could tell from looking at this data on a serial monitor that it was successfully connecting to the cabin's WiFi network, which was connected successfully to the internet. So all I could do was open a trouble ticket at SolArk.com, including (like almost no other customer would) a bit of the serial communication between the inverter and the WiFi dongle as an attachment.
At some point in all this, I noticed a banner at the top of the SolArk pages saying that on June 4th, they had migrated all their customers away from PowerView to a new host called SolArkCloud.com. This explained the entire problem. The solution (from both tech support and their FAQ) was to log in to the new host, but this didn't work for me. Evidently the installer, a guy named AJ, had ownership of the account, so he had the only credentials they'd migrated to the new platform. My login was some secondary one that was too rare to have been considered as necessary to migrate. Eventually SolArk figured out (to their credit, they seemed to be working past normal office hours to solve such problems), gave me full control, and I had access to my inverter's data on the new platform. Looking at it in a web browser, it didn't seem to be very different from PowerView. All the data was the same, it was just displayed with a dark theme. Now what I needed to do was to figure out what was different from PowerView under the hood so I could update my API and get my cabin automation working again.
Meanwhile, Gretchen and Charlotte had gone down to the lake, which Gretchen even managed to swim in. The air above the lake was a bit cool for such summertime activities, but the water itself was still balmy from warmer recent days. Later I went down to the lake in the late evening and went for a little paddle in the kayak. Throckmorton the Loon even made an appearance.
For dinner, Gretchen made a sort of tempeh and asparagus stir fry with a big pot of special brown rice contained sauteed onions and garlic. But the brown rice was old and when I tasted it, it tasted of mold. At that point Gretchen went to smell the remaining uncooked rice, and it too smelled strongly of mold. We ended up earmarking all the cooked rice for the dogs (yes, they can handle that amount of onions, dumbass!) and Gretchen cooked up ramen to replace it. As she was doing that, she kept noting how she'd put all this work into this meal, yet all it was was just a stir fry. It ended up being really good with the ramen as the carbohydrate.
Later this evening, I used the Chrome developer console to figure out how to alter my SolArk data API. It turned out that the migration from PowerView had changed very little. The only real change was the new domain and the plant ID (the ID of my inverter). The migration exposed a few places where I had accidentally hardcoded some things that shouldn't've been. But before long I had my remote control system once more looking at (and acting on) data from my inverter.
[REDACTED]

Throckmorton the Loon looks back at me from the south end of Woodworth Lake. Click to enlarge.

Fog over the outflow bay in Woodworth Lake this evening. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is: http://asecular.com/blog.php?240607 feedback previous | next |