pyess 0.0.2

Library for communicating with LG ESS solar power converters/batteries

Python library for communication with LG ESS power converter / energy storage devices for photovoltaic solar generators

This library is not endorsed by the manufacturer. It was written for lack of an official API. It should allow to design home automation around the current state of a solar energy system - e.g. turn appliances on when there is surplus solar power. LG only offers access via a badly scriptable web page or alternatively via a proprietary app that - at least on my phone - crashes at least twice for every successful startup.

Disclaimer: For this python module I reverse-engineered the communication between the LG EnerVu Plus 1.2.3 Android App and the Energy Storage / Inverter device, so there is some likelihood that it will work for devices that can be accessed via that app. Nevertheless it looks like some of the interface is delivered by the ESS as html via the network. Therefore it may be that not all commands work against all boxes. I only have customer-level access to my own box, so this module only offers those parts of the API that are accessible to me as a customer. As far as I can tell the installer has higher privileges and can fiddle with internal parameters of the system from what I saw him do when he installed the system.

Usage

Command Line

This module comes with a rudimentary command line interface that allows for the following actions.

Fetch the device password

Caveat: To fetch the device password you need to be connected to the devices wifi. Once you are on the wifi you can run the following to get the password. Write it down, it seems it is a static password per device:

esscli --action get_password

The command assumes that the ess device is listening on 192.168.23.1 on its own wifi, in my setup it reproducibly chooses that IP.

Find the esses on your network

Get a list of ESS devices on the local network (your home wifi, not the one of ess):

esscli --action list_ess

Fetch the state from ess as json

fetch a bunch of json states as json and display the result on the command line:

esscli --action get_state --password <your_ess_password>

Examples for the data available: - current power from and to the grid and the battery - current voltage and power from both strings of the photovoltaic system independently - current ip address - details on grid power, battery state, daily and monthly statistics

Log ess state into a graphite server

This command will fetch the home and common info from ess every 10 seconds and log them against a graphite server (assuming standard port and udp as protocol). Running this command requires the ess password to be passed on the command line:

esscli --action log_against_graphite --password <your_ess_password> --graphite <ip_of_graphite_server>

API

For the time being please use the docstrings in the code on https://github.com/gluap/pyess as documentation for the API. A good place to start is pyess/cli.py where you can find the implementation of the CLI. One thing available via the API but not yet via the CLI is the data for the daily / weekly / monthly / yearly statistics graphs that can be accessed via the EnerVu App.

Changelog

2019-10-09 0.0.1 - More documentation - Initial commit for pypi relase

License:

Copyright (c) 2019 Paul Görgen

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