Tesla Solar + Powerwall Support

There is a LARGE population of Tesla Solar and Powerwall owners who would love to see real-time solar generation, and Powerwall consumption on a single display. There is a public API on the Powerwall Gateway so to be able to read the data every second and update it on the Tidbit would be huge, and would further expand your user group.

Check out this GITHUB Repo for details, but if you could do this, I can advertise it you will increase your audience for sure.

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Hi there,

I love this idea! What all would you want the app to display? The things I could think of are the percentage of the charge and if it was charging or draining. Anything else? Would love to hear your thoughts.

In the short term, I’ll leave you with this:

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Awesome image. I think two things come to mine. (1) Showing the state of charge of the Powerwall, and (2) if there is an grid outage, and if we are running on Powerwall and how many hours of power are gaining (the latest Tesla app shows the approximate hours remaining based on current load, (3) When StormWatch has been engaged by Tesla…

All three have HUGE value, and if it was possible, I think you will have a huge influx of Tesla Solar owners who are interested in Tidbyt. People are building their own, but it just take too much time. If you offered this it would be a HUGE hit!

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AFAIK the apps actually run on Tidbyt’s servers and to fetch data from Tesla API they would need to have your Tesla account credentials - this also means complete control over your car(s), if any.

I would really love to have Tidbyt display the same data that I can see on the PowerWall page of the Tesla app (state of charge, power to/from solar, house, mains, blackout status, …) but I’d consider that only if my credentials are stored locally (ie. the Tidbyt itself is making the actual API calls to Tesla).

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PS to my previous post.

Yes, the https://github.com/vloschiavo/powerwall2 repository has info about talking to the local Tesla Energy Gateway in your house and that is a completely different thing from the Tesla API used by the Tesla mobile app.

That could be a great way - I’m actually already reading that from that with a custom script and I display it with a rather ugly oldish tablet (just running the browser 24/7) - but since the Energy Gateway is only accessible inside your local network it would also need HTTP queries going off from a local device, not from cloud servers.

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Good point. I was hoping that they could generate tokens for certain Tesla products (ie, energy separate from vehicle), but I guess not. It was a good thought because it would have been one of the killer apps for Tidbyt I would think.

Thanks for doing more in-depth research into the idea.

In some countries (and possibly depending on your luck when contacting Tesla support) it is possible to share a PowerWall device between multiple Tesla account, so you could in theory set up an account with just access to the power wall.

That being said, that account is still able to control your power wall, probably not to the extent to create actual “damage” but a partial denial of service if possible by just setting the PW to 100% reserve for outages (and the PW will not give you energy nor charge from solar). Also from a privacy standpoint the PW api could give out your address / geolocation (iirc - not 100% sure).

The only “correct” implementation I can think of would be to have the Tidyt able to speak IP with the PW (that means: it’s in the same LAN or the user sets up routing/nat/vpn from different networks) and the Tidbyt autonomously queries the local API on the PowerWall itself to fetch, parse and display data.

A partial solution, more for the tech-savvy users out there, would be a script to fetch data (from PW API or from the global Tesla API), the user runs that script somewhere (so he/she is responsible for security and privacy) and the script then renders the view and sends a PUSH to Tidbyt APIs. I could probably try to write that by myself someday, if that happens I’ll be sure to report here.

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This is a great idea. Any progress on this from people who can program ? The powerwall information is available locally in my network and could easily be accessed and pushed to the Tidbyt - it won’t even have to go to Tidbyts server, right ? I looked at the information on github https://github.com/vloschiavo/powerwall2 but not having any programming skills, I’m lost :wink:

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Another vote here. The Powerwall does not have its own display hardware so this would be a great addition. Just 4 parameters would do the job

Solar Production kW
Powerwall % full
House Load kW
Grid Load kW

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Any love here people? Seems like a smart mind can whip this out in no time. Please, would be awesome!

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I agree. Unfortunately even though I’m willing to learn, the learning curve of getting information onto the Tidbyt is pretty steep.

That would be great. I have a NAS that runs 24/7 and it could fetch data from the powerwall in regular intervals and then push that to the Tidbyt. If anyone could come up with a solution this would be great.

Last traffic on this topic was Jan 2023. I agree with many of you in this thread that a local API / LAN access is what I would need for this to be an awesome widget. @AndrewM mentioned the 4 parameters of Solar Production kW, Powerwall % full, House Load kW and Grid Load kW would do the job. I agree, and being someone with no power wall (just Tesla solar panels), I’d like to be able to just disable the displaying of the Powerwall portion. With the Tidbyt audience growing, any renewed or additional interest in this becoming a reality? I certainly don’t have the skills, but would be eager to do any beta testing for those with said skills :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi Corey,
Check out the TeslaSolar app it may do what you want. I don’t have Tesla solar panels so could not get it to do anything for me.

Keep hoping for some clever person to come up with a PowerWall display for Tidbyt…

I setup the TeslaSolar plugin for Tudbyt and got my Tesla refresh token but where do I find my site id?

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Struggling with the same thing. I got a refresh token but don’t know what to use for site ID. I’ve tried the solar inverter ID that is a 14 character alphanumeric string, but nothing happens. If there’s an easy step-by-step guide for setting this up, I haven’t found it.

i was able to get it using the TeslaPy package: GitHub - tdorssers/TeslaPy: A Python module to use the Tesla Motors Owner API

basically install it and then make a python script like this, replacing your email:

import teslapy
tesla = teslapy.Tesla('[email protected]')
if not tesla.authorized:
    print('Use browser to login. Page Not Found will be shown at success.')
    print('Open this URL: ' + tesla.authorization_url())
    tesla.fetch_token(authorization_response=input('Enter URL after authentication: '))
batteries = tesla.battery_list()
print(batteries[0])
tesla.close()

once you execute and authorize (go to the provided url, log in to the tesla website, copy the resulting url of the error page once logged in, copy that into the script prompt), it will give you battery information, including the first line titled “energy_site_id” which is the number you need.

this YouTube video walks through the process: Tesla Authentication - Finally Found Something That Works! - YouTube

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