kiwi

This tiny app makes it easy to find registered devices from your kiwigrid installation and read their values via command line.

What is "kiwigrid"?

Kiwigrid is a german smart metering platform you might already be using with your PV plant.

If you are using a PV battery from SOLARWATT like I do and you are used to check your stats on their EnergyManager portal, you're ready to go.

Other battery manufacturers might also be supported. In lack of test devices, I could not verify others.

Usage

kiwi requires the ip address from your local API gateway which is sending your data to kiwigrid. Use the ip address with the --ip argument. Read on to find out how to discover your API gateway in your local network.

Your API gateway will provide many measurements for the devices that were registered upfront. You will need to query them with the name of the corresponding device. Read on to find the names of the devices that are available to you. These device names make the argument --device.

kiwi can read one or multiple values for the specified device. Simply define these values with the argument --tag as shown below. Usually, there are a lot of values in the response of your API gateway. Read on to find out which values are available to you.

Querying a single value:

kiwi read --ip=192.168.178.83 --device=MyReserve --tag=StateOfCharge

92.5

Querying multiple values:

kiwi read --ip=192.168.178.83 --device=MyReserve --tag=StateOfCharge --tag=ModeConverter --tag=StateOfHealth
  
{"StateOfCharge":"92.5","ModeConverter":"DISCHARGING","StateOfHealth":"96"}

Include the timestamp of the API request

kiwi read --ip=192.168.178.83 --device=MyReserve --tag=StateOfCharge --add-timestamp
  
{"StateOfCharge":"92.5","UtcTimeStamp":"2022-11-17T18:54:16.1410811Z"}

Full command line reference

kiwi --help

Finding your local API gateway

To use this app, you need to know the ip address of your local API gateway which is sending your data to kiwigrid.

Scan your local network to find this device. If you find possible candidates, try them with this URL template:

• http://IPADDRESS/rest/kiwigrid/wizard/devices

You should get a JSON response immediately. If you do, this is you local API gateway.

If you are using SOLARWATT's EnergyManager, you can find the local ip address easily. Just head over to the portal, login and click on the highlighted menu:

Verifying registered devices

In case you did not find the device you were looking for or you want to verify whether the found name is the correct one, navigate to your API gateway with your browser (see "Finding your local API gateway") and inspect the JSON response. Look for tag values with name "IdName". You should find one block whose value contains the name of the device you are looking for.

Finding values to read

Once you found the API gateway you might want to inspect the values you can read from there. Simply navigate to your API gateway with your browser (see "Finding your local API gateway") and inspect the JSON response.

In the response, you will find many information blocks that are assigned to a device over a guid. This guid belongs to a device which is linked together in a "IdName" tag value (see image above).

These blocks also contain a tagName which is the metric like "StateOfHealth" and a value which holds the value for this metric.

In the example above, the following command ...

kiwi read --ip=... --device=... --tag=StateOfHealth

would return the value 96