In Part 1, Modbus data was figured out and it’s floating point output was converted to decimal. Additionally, knowledge of how to activate relays using Node Red was achieved.
In Part 2, the first sub flow will listen for a High Voltage Disconnect (HVD) and activate a relay accordingly. The sub flow will do a modbus read of a solar controller, and listen for the HVD bit. Morningstar solar controllers activate HVD when a Lithium battery is fully charged, to prevent overcharging . When the HVD bit is positive, Node Red will tell the 1216H to close a relay corresponding to that controller. The closure in turn opens a higher current relay and disconnects the panels and RFI stops. RFI is generated when a controller is allowing the solar panel to run with no load. Let’s begin.
Here is the first section of the flow, which retrieves the byte that contains the HVD bit, bit 4. The address and the bit position are in the Morningstar documentation at this link: https://www.morningstarcorp.com/wp-content/uploads/technical-doc-prostar-modbus-specification-en.pdf
Refer to the figure above as the remaining nodes are explained.
Focus on the node in the upper left corner that says, “Strass Gray HVD”. This is the Modbus-Read node which retrieves the byte with the HVD bit. It is configured in the pane below. A polling rate of 1 minute is adequate to determine when a battery is fully charged.
In the next node down, labelled “bit 4”, in the flow above, the correct bit is extracted from the byte, which is bit 4, per the Morningstar document. The tool chatGPT was asked to write a Node Red function using javascript to select bit 4 of the input, and output the selected bit. Below, the result has been copied and pasted into a function node. It looks like chatGPT started on the first bit and rotated to the right three times to get to bit 4.
Next node down is a switch node, labelled simply “switch”. A switch node can be thought of as an if-then-else logic block. If the input is one state the switch will output a result to one of it’s output ports. If the input state is different the switch will output to a different port. Here the switch is being used to output a 1 on the top port when the input is a 1, and a 0 to the bottom port when the input is 0.
Continuing around the flow, the next node down is an Inject node labelled “0”. When clicked on, this node will inject a 0 into the switch node. This will cause the relay to be turned off in case of emergency.
The next node down is a link. A link node takes the data from it’s input and links it to another link node somewhere else in the flow and transfers the data. In this flow the link is taking the data from the top output of the switch node and linking that data to the input of a node that will do a reset in that other flow. The logic behind doing this reset is as follows. When the top output of the switch is active that means a High Voltage Disconnect has occured because a battery is fully charged. Since the battery is fully charged it is at a State Of Charge (SOC) of 100%. The link to another flow resets a gauge for SOC to 100%. This allows the SOC to be calibrated each cycle. Next the nodes on the right-hand side will be explained beginning at the top.
The top node on the right is the Modbus Response. This node is necessary to complete the conversation with the mod bus, which was started by the Modbus Read node.
Next down the line is a complicated looking node with a lable of “curl http:\\192.168…..”. This is an exec node which has the power of executing any command that could be executed at the shell prompt (command line interface or CLI) of the machine running the node red application. In this case the command is a “curl”. Hubspot defines curl this way:
A command line tool that enables data exchange between a device and a server through a terminal. Using this command line interface (CLI), a user specifies a server URL (the location where they want to send a request) and the data they want to send to that server URL.
In other words, we can execute a command to go to a web page, in this case the Microbits 1216H module. Here is how the exec node is configured:
Notice the i.p. address above is a private local address. This address could just as easily be an address anywhere on the Internet and Node Red could do it’s job from a remote location any where in the world that has Internet access.
Next down is a function labelled “change msg.payload”. This node takes the “1” in the payload given it by the switch node and changes the payload output to “DISC” which stands for “disconnect”.
A similar function node is next down except this function node changes the payload to “NORM” which stands for normal. Both of these last two nodes feed into a text node which had the purpose of printing text to a dashboard. The configuration is slightly unusual in that two words are printed to the dashboard by the text node. The first word goes into the label field, in this case HVD. The second word comes in as the payload from the previous node, in this case either DISC or NORM.
This concludes the HVD subflow. Subflows remaining to be documented when time permits are:
- Array and Battery Volts and Amps
- Coulomb Counter
- Display PA Temp
- Heaters
The chain of subflows is duplicated three more times, one for each battery lineup.
W0QL - My Remote Base Journal 