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Gen4 Installation Notes

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Jan C edited this page Mar 29, 2022 · 18 revisions

The Gen4 inverters do not have a fixed Ethernet or Wifi interface. A pocketLAN or pocketWiFi adapter can be used to connect the inverter to the cloud. The inverter however does not provide the Modbus protocol on its pocket LAN or wifi interface. Modbus communication must be done through the serial RS485 COM port.

This port is marked COM on the inverter, some user manuals by mistake claim that this is an Ethernet port. DO NOT CONNECT THIS COM PORT TO AN ETHERNET SWITCH - your Ethernet switchport will die if you do !!! The RS485 interface uses only the pin4 (blue wire) and pin5 (white-blue). Polarity matters, so make sure pin4 (blue wire in typical cables) is connected to the A lead of your adapter and pin5 (white-blue wire) to the B lead of your adapter. RS485 cables can be fairly long, so 25 meter or more is possible. You can use the blue pair of a standard cat5 or cat6 cable.

To connect the inverter to your HA, you will need either:

  • A RS485 to Ethernet adapter (cost 25 €) - This is the perferred way
  • A RS485 to USB adapter (cost 2 €) - This is a simple way, but HA may report thousands of warnings "blocking call inside the event loop"

By default, the Solax serial port operates at 19200 baud. We have only tested with this speed.

In case you can read parameters, but cannot modify them, your inverter is probably still locked. See main README file for more information on how to unlock.

We have tested following devices:

Option 1: Waveshare RS485 to ETH (B): (DIN rail mounted model)

image image

  • connects through Ethernet to your home network router/switch
  • use the "vircom" tool (Windows) to set the IP address matching your lan (or to let the device use DHCP, it does not use DHCP by default)
  • configure it to use "Modbus TCP to RTU", make sure the work mode is "TCP Server" and the server listens to port 502
  • in "more advanced settings", set Modbus Gateway Type to "Simple Modbus to TCP/IP mode"
  • all other paramaters can be left default

When configuring the Solax Modbus integration, specify the network IP address of the Waveshare device, not the address of the solax. Do not tick the Serial RS485 flag; the serial port is ignored in this setup.

Option 2: low cost generic USB to RS485 adapter

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  • directly USB-connected to your HA system
  • this low cost model can be found in various webshops, search for USB RS485
  • chipset CH340C (similar products with FTDI FT232 chipset should also work but are more expensive)

When configuring the Solax Modbus Integration, tick the 'RS485 serial port' flag, and specify the actual serial port name (as seen in the output of 'ls /dev/ttyUSB*'). In case you have more than one usb device, it makes sense to use the name seen in the output of 'ls /dev/serial/by-id'. In this setup, the IP address and TCP port do not matter, use 'localhost' as IP address and leave the TCP port default 502.

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