Hello Solar Guppy,

I got my Meterbus adapter today from Morningstar, and I'm looking at a mess of gender benders, terminal adapters, serial to RJ adapters, parallel to serial adapters, rollover cables, modem & null modem adapters etc..

I've tried every combination of everything I have laying around and the best I can get is the RX on solid and the TX blinking within SC-View.

I guess I have two questions. Does it take a while for the data to load into SC-View for the first time? And, the Meterbus instructions show a serial cable between the Meterbus adapter and the PC. Is that really needed or can I just plug the meterbus directly into my serial port? I think a standard serial cable is basically "straight through", so I wouldn't think it's needed. The meterbus adapter is kinda clunky so the serial cable would be nicer sticking out of the back of the PC.

Either way I'm not having much luck. Let me know if you have any ideas.

Thanks!

Its a straight thru cable on the PC to MS adapter, then the standard RJ11 from the adapter to the SunSaver Mppt. If you like you can connect the MS adapter directly to the PC's RS232 ( or a USB to RS232 adapter )

Make sure you have dip switch #4 in the on position ( SUnSaver Mppt )and that the Sunsaver is connected to a battery.

Green full battery LED is lit solid, with heartbeat LED blinking green on controller. I tried multiple RJ-11 cords (both 2-wire and 4-wire). DIP #4 is up.

I confirmed a standard serial cable is straight through pin 1 --> pin 1, pin 2 --> pin2, etc.. so it's kinda pointless to even use the cable since I have easy access to my serial port. So I plug the Modbus directly into the PC serial.

I'm going to give it another try tonight on a different PC, hope I have better luck there..

The RJ11 is a 6 wire, not 4 or 2. This should be explained in the SunSaver Manual

Finally! got it working using another PC.. Not sure what's going on with the laptop.

Sorry for the RJ-11 confusion.. I tried a 2-wire (pins 3&4) since nothing was working and I had nothing to loose. The instruction sheet does show 6-pin, but 4-pin works fine (pins 2,3,4,5) since they duplicated pins 1&2 and 5&6.

Pinout for RJ-11:
1 = GND
2 = GND
3 = TX/RX
4 = GND
5 = Power
6 = Power

Thanks again for the software.. looks great so far.

Last year when I hooked up the SS MPPT to my computer for the first time I used an ATEN UC-232A USB-to-serial dongle that I borrowed at work. This dongle worked fine with both SC-View and MSView.

I did not find a seller for the ATEN so I ordered a ST Labs U-224 USB-to-serial dongle but I can't get it to work. I tried it with an AVR evaluation board and it works but I can't get it to work with the SS MPPT and SC-View or MSView. Any ideas?

Thanks!

OS

Both SC-View and MS-View use RTS/DTR to generate power for the isolation interface ... my guess is the USB dongle you purchased doesn't have those pins. I've used literally 6-7 different generic converters over the years and never had an issue.

Hmmm... MS Tristar MPPT has 3 interfaces, and I've been most successful with MSView with the serial port. Never got data thru the modbus and its adapter, or the Ethernet port. I guess I'll try the serial port first when I'm at the system in late December.


http://tinyurl.com/LMR-Solar