Fox ESS Device

Hello,

I’m new to Homey, I am wanting to add my solar/battery system to myhomey however I don’t see any app so can someone please offer help/support on what my options are. I use the FoxCloud app on my iphone but is there anything I can use?

I have a Home Pro Mini (New version) with a Bridge for extra devices/features.

Thank you

Possible options:

  • Wait for an app for Homey to appear (might be tomorrow, might be never)
  • Set up a Home Assistant server with the FoxESSCloud integration and use the Homey Home Assistant app to pull the data into Homey
  • Check if your inverter support Modbus; if so, with some additional hardware (documented here) and the Homey Modbus app you may (no guarantees) get it working with Homey.

And you can follow the link presented for missing device apps; if and when someone creates an app is up to the stars and moon:

I’ve learned H.A. is your best friend, also for (quickly) adding missing stuff to Homey (amongst many other things!):

Thank you both. I will pull out my pi and install HA.

Hi @Carter you might now be quite happy with the FoxESS>HA>Homey solution, if so, no issues. Just an fyi that i have built a rudimentary Device locally for my FoxESS inverter via the Homey v3 SDK, but this custom app is really only for me to use and i have not published fully to the Homey App store, etc. I can however provide the node.js package to you, so you can use homey cli to install it and update it as you see fit.

The app has settings for API Key and Serial Number, and polling time 1-300 seconds; it pulls data from the foxesscloud.com website, not directly from the inverter fyi. The cloud data is only updated every 5mins also, but that’s fine for me as I’m not using it to drive buying/selling power, just for monitoring and basic flow triggers, all of which is working really well for me so far.

Note that I built this via the FoxESS API home page, and Perplexity and ChatGPT ‘Codex’ tools, so I am not a proper programmer by any stretch of the imagination; however, if I can do it, then anyone can these days basically…Codex is an amazing tool!

Cheers, Gray.

Hi, yes I’d love to give it a try. The HA to Homey is ok but I would prefer a “in house” homey option. If you could send me the node.js I’d be grateful.

Cheers

@Carter Please see GitHub - crazy-gray-v8/foxesscloud-homey: FoxESS Cloud API query from Homey using SDK v3 to retrieve Inverter and Battery data. · GitHub for the code. I’ve also got another ‘snippets’ project which I used during scaffolding / analysis, so take a quick look at that too. Let me know if any major issues…Cheers, Gray.

OK, Have it installed on my Homey Pro just fine. I have added my API and Serial number and can see it working but need to give it sometime to see how it populates etc.

I’ll keep in touch as this is a great start to having FoxESS on Homey and hopfully admin will take note.

EDIT:

@GrayV8 I’ve had it running since install but I’m finding these issues

Battry SoC - last updated 56 years ago
Battery Energy - last updated 56 years ago
Solar Gen. last updated 8 hours ago (time of install)
Home Use: updating fine, showing correct information
Batt. Charging: updating fine, showing correct information
Batt. Discharging: last updated 8 hours ago (time of install)
Grid Feed-in: showing nothing but updated within the last 15 minutes
Grid Use: updating fine, showing correct information

I’ve clicked the ‘Refresh Now’ under the maintenance section but its not fixing the sections not updating. I’ve left the poll intervel at 300 seconds.

Hey @Carter , well at least it is accessing some data etc, that’s a pretty good start. It is odd that some of the fields are not displaying but it’s likely due to differences in the inverter h/w, s/w versions, or whatever.

Either way, you’re probably best to check out the code snippets I mentioned in the other repo I have on GH and use the API call which returns all of the available fields for your particular set up, as the FoxESS API page specifically states that these will differ. Then you can see the name of each field you want to grab and make the custom code changes as necessary.

I’m surprised that SoC doesn’t show but then I did actually have issues with that field; in my python code it had to be named SoC_1 but in the js code it had to be just SoC.

Btw, I think when a given Homey device doesn’t show an updated time for a given data element it can often mean it just happens to be the same value as last time, not that it actually hasn’t updated it. At least, that’s what I think I’ve seen here…

See how you go, keep me posted…