GroBro with Noah and uni-meter as shelly/eco-tracker emulation possible?

[criticallimit]

As the title already shows I tested today if the uni-meter can be used with GroBro on my Noah.
GroBro is working fine in cloud or no-cloud configuration. But I can´t get the Shelly or Eco-Tracker (uni-meter emulation) added in the shineApp, even when cloud is activated in BroBro and Noah has full internet access.

Anyone here using this setup successfully?

[criticallimit]

To answer my initial question:

IT IS WORKING!

We can get the smartmode working completely off the cloud with GroBro.
Installed the uni-meter addon in HA, emulating a shelly. Enabled Slot1 in "smart Mode" and let it go.
Working since a few hours very good. Setting only the Noah output Power without changing default Power or Slot1 Power.
Think this changes now are stored in the RAM of the Noah, if I understand right from other communities.

Further Testing of behavior is neccessary, but if it is working flawlessly I will do a PR. We need to change the Slot Modes to 0,1,and 2 again instead only 0 and 1.

Will report later.....

[criticallimit]

perfect! Thnx.

Maybe you can also think about the HA slider for settings. For the Mode it would be better to have a select box. in the actual version you only allow "number", "button" or "switch". Would be great to add "select", so we can show clear text as enum and not variables 0,1,2

[justinh998]

I've actually been running this setup for a few weeks now, and it works. The question is, of course, whether the whole thing is capable of working offline. I could well imagine that the battery downloads the information from the cloud after the connected smart meter every time it reconnects to the Wi-Fi. However, this theory is contradicted by the fact that the battery sends mDNS requests to the network and searches for the Shelly again every time it reconnects.

But as far as I can tell, the cloud only sends an mqtt command to the battery during setup, and the battery does the rest.

[microraptor]

@criticallimit, just to clarify: Did you setup the smart meter before using the ShinePhone app, when the Noah was connected to cloud (as described by justinh998 in #89), then set GROWATT_CLOUD to false afterwards and it continued to work in smart mode without cloud connection? Or are you saying with current firmware, it is not necessary to do any setup before and it is possible to completely setup and use the smart meter mode without any cloud connection?

Thank you guys for figuring out how this works so far. It would be indeed interesting to see, if using the Noah works well with a smart meter without any further cloud connections after setup, or if it will require a cloud connection once in a while for some reconnection reasons.

[criticallimit]

@microraptor:
Yes, I setup everything with cloud enabled. After I added the shelly in the shinephone-App, I cut off the cloud and the Noah completely. This is working fine until everything is working normally. But fails when Home Assistant is restarting. I do not recommend using smartmode at this time. Even with Cloud set, Noah looses the Shelly. Checked it now several times in the shinephone-app. Even after waiting for hours the shelly is not recovering reliable. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

[microraptor]

Thank you for your detailed reply. I also read that people, who even have an original Shelly and are not using uni-meter and GroBro as intermediaries, have a buggy experience with the smart meter mode of the NOAH. Perhaps eventually Growatt will make this work more stable with firmware updates.

I suppose for now it might be best to control the output limit via the microinverter instead of the NOAH: The microinverter has to have support some kind of dynamic output control and the NOAH is set to load first with 800W output (but the real output is limited by the inverter). The NOAH then uses the leftover power to charge the battery.