
Testing Your SolarMAX Lead Acid System
If you are using a SkyWeather system, SkyWeather comes with support for SolarMAX. If you don’t have a
SkyWeather system, jump down to “Testing your SolarMAX with a Raspberry Pi”. If you see the yellow light
on the Mini Pro LP board (Part D) flicker about every 30 seconds then you are transmitting data. If you want
to see what you are transmitting, hook up an FTDI cable (
https://shop.switchdoc.com/products/ftdi-
https://www.adafruit.com/product/70
) and look at the serial panel (baud =
115200) in the Arduino IDE and you will see lots of data about what the SolarMAX system is doing and
reporting.
In either of these two testing methods, the first thing to do is to power down your Raspberry Pi and plug the
second LoRa Radio (Part H) into the Serial port on your Pi2Grover board (
https://shop.switchdoc.com/products/
pi2grover-raspberry-pi-to-grove-connector-interface-board
).
Testing With SkyWeather
Power down your system. Then plug in the LoRa Radio (Part H) into the Serial Grove connector on the
Raspberry Pi Pi2Grover board.
Next, login into your Raspberry Pi in the SkyWeather kit and “cd SDL_Pi_SkyWeather”
Note: You can’t be running SkyWeather in the background when you are running this test. You must kill the
process by doing something similar to this (your process number will be different):
pi@switchdoclabs:~/SDL_Pi_SkyWeather $ ps xaf | grep python
236 ? Ss 24:52 /usr/bin/python -O /usr/share/wicd/daemon/wicd-daemon.py --no-daemon --
keep-connection
502 ? S 13:29 \_ /usr/bin/python -O /usr/share/wicd/daemon/monitor.py
22940 pts/0 S+ 0:00 | \_ grep --color=auto python
22889 pts/1 S+ 0:00 \_ sudo python SkyWeather.py
22894 pts/1 Sl+ 0:18 \_ python SkyWeather.py
pi@switchdoclabs:~/SDL_Pi_SkyWeather $
Then you have to kill the process:
sudo kill -9 22894
Then you can check to see the process has been killed.
pi@switchdoclabs:~/SDL_Pi_SkyWeather $ ps xaf | grep python
236 ? Ss 24:53 /usr/bin/python -O /usr/share/wicd/daemon/wicd-daemon.py --no-daemon --
keep-connection
502 ? S 13:30 \_ /usr/bin/python -O /usr/share/wicd/daemon/monitor.py
23014 pts/0 S+ 0:00 | \_ grep --color=auto python
pi@switchdoclabs:~/SDL_Pi_SkyWeather $
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Version 1.4 December 2019