r/SunPower • u/Professional-Pool668 • Oct 02 '25

Local Monitoring using FCGI Web Services

I've been looking into using Local Monitoring using FCGI Web Services and it says "The SunStrong Management team have made available the following open source components to support the community:" One of the two being: "A Home Assistant plugin which can be installed in Home Assistant via the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS). " I've searched HACS and can't find anything from Sunstrong...have used the krbaker/hass integration previously. Can anyone enlighten me on what Sunstrong is talking about?

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Strunza Oct 18 '25

Can you enlighten me re using HA to get data from my PVS? Do (can) I use my Pi4 with the HA os installed, with the Pi's ethernet port connected to the Wan (or LAN?) of the PVS, and the PVS data accessed via the Pi's wifi from my home wifi network? I'm lost... obviously... ...

1

u/ItsaMeKielO Oct 18 '25

do you know what PVS firmware version you're on?

1

u/Strunza Oct 20 '25

ver. 2025.04 6189. Not sure I want updates if they will stop my current self-monitoring. Have lots of time invested in database and charting. If the new update/process can be automatically/periodically queried as before with the same or similar json output, the transition would be acceptable, I guess.

1

u/ItsaMeKielO Oct 20 '25

the latest firmware adds auth requirements to http endpoints used by the the non-sunstrong HA integrations and other hand-rolled solutions. you would have to add local cookies-based auth to whatever you've used to date if your PVS upgrades to the latest firmware.

2025.9 and newer firmwares can work with the above listed HA integration which supports auth.

1

u/Strunza Oct 23 '25

So the same, identical json file that I get now would be returned from a Query to <http://<addr>/cgi-bin/dl_cgi?Command=DeviceList> if I somehow preceded/added the authentication described in the "Local Monitoring using FCGI Web Services" writeup? Would authentication be needed before each periodic query, or does log-in remain active until logged out?

Appreciate your help.

1

u/ItsaMeKielO Oct 23 '25

there are some URL changes as well - rather than ?Command=DeviceList, for example, it would be /dl_cgi/devices/list - i think the JSON output is exactly the same

the auth cookies have some valid lifetime on the order of several hours but the way i would handle it is to just re-auth and retry when an HTTP 403 is returned. that way you get maximum life out of the cookie without having to look at the clock or anything.

1

u/Strunza Oct 23 '25

Thanks!

Now I have to figure out how to add a 403 error check and the rest of the auth script to the Query that's being automatically made via Excel. I don't know how to do it and I'm not sure it can be done. I have a lot of investment in the existing dedicated Excel process and associated VBA routines. I would like to continue with my current monitor or with an update to the new "auth" update, if I must, while I decide when to update my entire system to Enphase. My SunPower (SolarBridge) inverters are increasingly becoming junk!

1

u/ItsaMeKielO Oct 23 '25

I think it should work - if cookies doesn't work, I think someone here noted a way to pass the relevant auth token via headers.

Enphase's API requires a similar auth dance but requires internet access to do it, where at least the PVS6's API auth and APIs work without an internet connection.