Work in progress: !Solar
Saturday, September 20, 2025
We’ve had solar panels for nearly 14 years now, and the output has been reported daily on our site. The page is currently generated by a Python program running on a Raspberry Pi (a Pi400 at the moment), but I’ve been working on a version running under RISC OS, using BBC BASIC. Here are some samples of the output:
It’s unfinished as yet, but work continues slowly…
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Monday, September 22, 2025 - 13:30:00
This looks great. Was it not possible to convert the Python to run on RISC OS - Python 3 is available for the Pi running RO5.30+. What solar interface does this work with ? We have a couple of systems but the only one i think which has a web api is the enphase based system.
Monday, September 22, 2025 - 16:34:44
> Was it not possible to convert the Python to run on RISC OS
I did consider that, but I’ve found RO Python a bit unstable, and there were problems with libraries. Also I have no idea how to code a RO wimp application in Python, and how to use sprite and draw SWI calls … the documentation is a bit sparse :-/ And I already had some ancient BASIC libraries.
> What solar interface does this work with ?
The inverter is a SunnyBoy, and there’s a readout gadget called a SunnyBeam which gets the panel data via Bluetooth from the inverter. The SunnyBeam has a USB port so you can access daily and monthly files in CSV format. Unfortunately RO doesn’t like the USB storage layout — it’s partitioned a bit oddly, so I have to read the data using a Pi, then transfer it to our NAS where RO can access it.
In this system data is collected every ten minutes. Others are different — Octopus is every 30 minutes, I think. But I haven’t been able to find if Octopus makes the data available easily (just has its own closed smartphone app, I think, at least in the UK).