Pi-Based mostly Photo voltaic Knowledge Restoration Instrument
There are fairly just a few gadgets in the marketplace which have a Raspberry Pi as their core, and having develop into the proud proprietor of a photo voltaic roof, [Paolo Bonzini] discovered him self with the Intrade ENR-DTLA04DN datalogger who — let’s simply say, had some indicators, and at FOSDEM 2023, advised us all about it. Put in beneath the promise of native logging solely, the datalogger gave its nature with an influence brick emblazoned with the Raspberry Pi emblem, a spec sheet equivalent to that of the Pi 3, and the Raspberry Pi Basis’s MAC deal with. This spec sheet additionally talked about a MicroSD card – which finally died, prompting [Paolo] to take away the quilt. He threw away the defective SD card, then changed it – and put his SSH keys on the machine whereas he was at it.
At this level, Entrade now not provides gadgets with native recording, solely a cloud recording choice – free, however just for 5 years, clearly not an choice if you happen to like your property cloud-free; The native recording was additionally not with out its drawbacks and thus, the gadget was value exploring. A fast peek on the filesystem and I discovered two giant statically bundled binaries, and strace It gave him a option to spy on the RS485 communications between the datalogger and the photo voltaic roof reflector. Subsequent, dig into the diodes, and acquire info on how that gadget does its job. Beforehand, he discovered that the gadget introduced an undocumented API over HTTP whereas linked to its community, and evaluating the API’s work with the info contained in the binary obtained him some good outcomes – however not sufficient.
The primary binary is set to be Go code and [Paolo] He reveals us a step-by-step clarification of tips on how to reverse engineer such diodes in radare2with a small set of tips besides – for instance, capturing an output strings to GitHub URLs to see what libraries are used. Ultimately, after reverse engineering the protocol, it’s utterly rewrote this system, With out the earlier annoying bugs, integrating it into the MQTT house community that HomeAssistant works with. As a bonus, he additionally confirmed us the datalogger’s most important PCB, which turned out to be a curious innovation – doesn’t spoil the shock!
We think about this search isn’t solely helpful once you’re confronted with the demise of somebody just like a datalogger, but additionally helpful for individuals who discover themselves on the mercy of a sham-free cloud logging plan and need to choose out. Photo voltaic tech appears to be an space the place Raspberry Pi boards and proprietary interfaces aren’t unusual, which is why we’re seeing hackers reverse engineer solar-related gadgets – for instance, take a look at this exploration of the proprietary protocol for photo voltaic inverters to get the info out of it, Or reverse engineer an out-of-life, decommissioned however completely wholesome photo voltaic inverter software program to get the service menu password.
