Tag: windows

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Test Solar PV Monitoring Dashboards Using an Open-Source Renogy BT-1 Simulator

Renogy BT-1 telemetry provides useful information for monitoring the condition and performance of a solar photovoltaic system. It can report key values such as PV voltage, current, power generation, battery status, controller temperature, charging activity, and load consumption. These data are important for building dashboards, alerts, databases, and automation systems.

However, developing and testing such a monitoring system normally requires access to real Renogy hardware, including a compatible charge controller and BT-1 Bluetooth module. This can make early development difficult, especially when developers need to reproduce specific conditions such as low battery voltage, peak sunlight, nighttime discharge, or controller inactivity.

My latest open-source project, Renogy BT-1 Telemetry Simulator, removes this hardware requirement.

Application Screenshot

The Renogy BT-1 Telemetry Simulator addresses this problem by generating realistic sample telemetry and sending it as JSON to an HTTP or HTTPS endpoint without requiring physical solar equipment.

The simulator imitates telemetry commonly produced by a Renogy BT-1 module connected to a Renogy Rover MPPT charge controller.

You can manually configure values such as:

  • Solar PV voltage, current, power, and generated energy
  • Battery percentage, voltage, current, temperature, and battery type
  • Controller temperature and charging status
  • Load voltage, current, power, and energy consumption
  • Controller model, device ID, and BT-1 identifier

The application can also calculate PV and load power automatically.

Renogy BT-1 Telemetry Simulator Use Cases

The simulator is useful for testing the Solar PV under various situations:

  • Peak Sunshine
  • Nighttime operations
  • Low battery conditions
  • Heavy loads / light loads

Application Features

  • One-off HTTP Post transmission
  • Periodic transmission at a configurable interval
  • A default two-minute sending interval
  • Live JSON payload preview
  • Transmission logs with HTTP status, response, errors, and request duration

This is useful for testing local development servers, webhooks, staging systems, database storage, monitoring dashboards, and automated alerts before installing physical solar hardware.

Requirements

The application uses WPF and .NET 8, so it runs on Windows 10 or Windows 11. Developers can build it using Visual Studio 2022 or the standard dotnet command-line tools.

The current HTTP client accepts self-signed HTTPS certificates for local testing. This behaviour should not be treated as secure certificate validation for production systems.

Download the Source Code

Renogy BT-1 Telemetry Simulator is available on GitHub:

github.com/mypapit/renogybt1simulator

The project is released under the GNU General Public License version 3, allowing users to study, modify, and redistribute the source code according to the GPL terms.

This project is an independent simulator and is not an official Renogy product.

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yt-dlp – a verstatile video downloader tool

yt-dlp is a command-line tool for which allows a user to download audio/video from thousands of sites. The project is a fork of youtube-dl, which is based on the now inactive youtube-dlc.

yt-dlp can be installed using official releases or via package manager.

Unix-like operating system

curl -L https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/latest/download/yt-dlp -o ~/.local/bin/yt-dlp
chmod a+rx ~/.local/bin/yt-dlp  # Make executable

To update yt-dlp in Unix-like operating system

yt-dlp -U

Homebrew MacOS

brew install yt-dlp

Ubuntu

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tomtomtom/yt-dlp # Add ppa repo to apt
sudo apt update # Update package list
sudo apt install yt-dlp # Install yt-dlp

Snap

sudo snap install --edge yt-dlp

Windows operating system

yt-dlp is also available for Windows operating system by using, winget:

winget install yt-dlp

Microsoft Windows binary package

The binary package for Microsoft Windows binary package can be downloaded from yt-dlp GitHub release page

Note that yt-dlp requires ffmpeg windows binaries which can be obtained from gyan.dev’s Codex FFMPEG Build

Please refer to this post for more information on the tips and tricks on using yt-dlp.

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How to mount exFAT (used in SDcard / USB Drive) filesystem in Ubuntu

exFAT is a filesystem developed by Microsoft for use in flash drives or portable storage devices where the use of NTFS is not feasible. exFAT is inteded to be supported on consumer devices such as MP3 players, cameras, mobile phones and video recorders.

However filesystem formatted with exFAT are not currently supported by Ubuntu (as of 12.04) out from the box. In order to do that, you need to download exFAT filesystem module from relan PPA.

1. Add exFAT PPA repository

[bash]
sudo -s
apt-add-repository ppa:relan/exfat
[/bash]

2. Update apt-get repository
[bash]
apt-get update
[/bash]

3. Install exfat modules
[bash]
apt-get install fuse-exfat
[/bash]

That’s it you’re done! Then you can finally mounts exFAT filesystem using the following command….

4. mounting exFAT filesystem
[bash][/bash]
mount -t exfat /dev/sdd /media
[bash][/bash]

You should be able to mount exFAT filesystem from now on… the fuse-exfat also comes with ‘exfat-utils‘ package which enables the creation, checking and labelling exFAT filesystem.