It would be great if there was a way to just FTP the data only. I would rather have the data than a png file. This would accomplish a few things:
1. No need to screen scrape.
2. The invert display could run in the background on the PC without having to always have the window open and make sure nothing is on top of it.
3. People would not have to disable their screen saver.
4. I would then be able to capture the data to a database on my webserver.
Here is what I was thinking and I would be more than happy to share the PHP code from the webserver side once I'm done perfecting it.
- Add an option to log to a text file at the same time, or instead of, the PNG file.
- The text file should be the same name as the PNG file but with the extention .txt or .log
- Then when the FTP goes it will FTP both the TXT and PNG file up, if both are checked.
Then I could write something to display the numbers in a graphic exactly like your current one from the TXT file or just display the text so anyone with a cell phone with internet ability could see their numbers.
We could also capture to a mysql database to build some statistics over time if we wanted.
The web server could be set to send alerts when the inverters come online/offline or if they are not online by a certain time of day.
I think what you've done so far is awesome and this small enhancement would be great. Please let me know if you want to chat about this in anymore detail or if you have any questions. Hopefully you can work this into the next update.
Like I said if you could pass the raw data I would be happy to help on the web side and provide all the raw code back to you and support any enhancement you might want.
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