Direct serial connection... Remotely?

[Karakth]

Hey,

First off thanks for all the hard work for this amazing project.
Secondly, with the latest update comes a new recommended connection mode via direct serial connection. My issue is that the inverter is on the roof and my HA server is in the basement several floors away. Any ideas (short of running a usb cable for that distance) to connect it? Would it be possible to expose the sensors on a raspberry pi and communicating over MQTT?

[wlcrs]

[The main reason that I promote this solution as "recommended" is that now 95% of all issues/posts come from people that are having trouble setting up the networking part, and I even read about people buying routers just to set up the connection. For them it is benefitial to buy something that is simpler to setup. However, if you already have a working network setup there is no real benefit to change to the direct serial approach instead.

On to your question: I would look into a ModbusRTU (=serial) to ModbusTCP (=network) bridge.

If you already have a Pi lying around, you could look into using https://github.com/3cky/mbusd to set up such a bridge.

I already have an M5 Atom RS485 lying around that I want to flash with a modbus bridge to test a remote scenario as yours. But this is likely something that I only will get to during the winter months. There also exist commercial solutions like the EW11 (sometimes also marketed as HF7211-0) to create such a bridge, and I know of at least one person who is already successfully using this.

[JacoboSanchez]

I am the one with the EW11A device, we talked about it here. I have it on two different inverters. One of them since February and it is working fine . For the other one I was having some issues with powering it until I realiced some days ago that I can use the 5V from the dongle USB connector... (just need to figure out a way to isolate it properly to not have it exposed to humidity in the air)