We have adopted both the 493ah's and the 450G's for much of our backbone. We purchased Tristar 60 MPPT charge controllers because they have built in ethernet interfaces for monitoring. With the 450G's we have had no problems communicating with the Tristar. However with the 493ah's we never can. We have tried forcing all different modes such as 10Base-T Half, 10Base-T Full, 100Base-T Half, 100Base-T Full with to success.

Our normal configuration is to bridge the port the Tristar is off of with another management port.

Has anyone had similar problems with the 493ah and other devices or similar encounters with the Tristar 60 MPPT that they were able to solve?

Ryan

Ryan,
- try to use default settings for Ethernet interface on both sides;
- put "cheap" 100Mbps switch between them.

serjes,

I haven't tried your suggestion but I expect it would work because I know if I use the 450g inbetween the 493ah and the Tristar it works. This doesn't solve my problem because there is no such thing as a cheap switch in my scenario. Another switch means typically at least 7 more watts of power and another failure point. This also would increase the overall power draw of most of my sites at least 10% and often times as much as 25%, which costs me another $2500 in batteries and solar panels to achieve the runtime we need based upon the amount of sun we get in the winter.

I really needed to communicate directly between the Morningstar Tristar MPPT 60 and the 493ah or come up with a completely different design, which I can do, but none of the other designs seem to be as good as a solution as this would have been. Very disappointing to me if this is the case that I can't get these to communicate.

Ryan

Hey,

Dunno if this helps but we have a few MPPT 60's on our network and heres what weve found:

They work fine with the switch chip IC Plus 175C
They work fine with the switch chip Atheros 8316

They do not work at all with the switch chip IC PLus 175D

Hope this helps someone out there

Question to all: when we say "can't communicate" or "doesn't work", what do we mean?

I'm looking at an MPPT 60 now and I can't get the web page to fully load. It loads part-way.

Unit pings just fine. This one is attached to an RB750.

That sounds like an MTU size issue - can you ping your MPPT at 1500bytes? (without fragmenting) ?

In the case of not being able to reach the MPPT for us it was all or nothing - it wasn't pingable / wouldn't successfully get a DHCP lease.

What switch chip do you have, and, have you done /system routerboard upgrade - and made sure the port its connected to isnt in slave? finally you could try setting the port to 10mbit no autoneg and see if that improves things. The 750's can sometimes be a little flakey on the ethernet.

Any further info on this issue? I just installed a MPPT-60 connected to a 750UP and am having the "flaky" Web interface issue.

Running Morningstar's MODBUS software (MSView) works OK, so the MODBUS/TCP interface on port 502 works.

Just not the internal web server.

Have forced 10M, half-duplex, etc. Even tried MTU of various sizes. Nothing seems to help.

Some of the other solutions above may have worked. I can't remember if I tried them all or not. My memory is if anyone if still having trouble with this issue is that it was a chipset issues between the 493ah and the Tristar. Upgrading 493ah's to 493g's and I think also similarly the 450 series to the gigabit units also solved a similar problem.

We have issues with MPPT controllers falling offline when connected to Netonix switches. We can usually bounce the port on the Netonix and bring them back online for a while. We've begun to leave junk switches between the Netonix and the MPPTs. I don't think the ethernet chips in the MPPTs have been updated since the original design.

They do seem to work alright with the Ubiquiti ToughSwitches that we are trying to replace, even in full auto-negotiate mode.

It's a little off topic but make sure with Tristar the different firmware/software versions they call A & B or something like that are up to date. That helped me with some similar issues also. Rarely I would have the Tristar's completely lock up on their NIC and/or http server engine, I can't exactly remember now, and bouncing the port on the router/switch sometimes wouldn't even work. After making sure all my firmware including on Mikrotik hardware are up to date I don't have that problem with my Tristar's anymore. If you haven't already updated them that may help with your issue too.

Thanks!

We'll check on that in the spring / early summer when we have access to the sites again.