Is it possible to lock down a Modbus communication port?

[StevenHowell]

Good afternoon,

I have a piece of equipment, a solar charge controller that advertises to be able to communicate with it over RS-485 Modbus (2 wire).

I have been trying to connect with this thing unsuccessfully for some time now and the company I bought it from is offering no support.

They claim that the only way to communicate Modbus with this charge controller is through wireless access point that plugs into the RS485 port and encapsulates the Modbus into the wireless access point and can only be viewed by a phone app.

Is it possible to lock down Modbus like that over a serial connection? I was under the impression if it was a serial port that if you wired it up correctly and used a Modbus API that you could communicate with the device? Never heard of anyone locking down an open standard like Modbus proprietary to their wireless device.

[santo_13]

May be they changed wire pinout to be custom or added some password mode to start the charge controller to communicate?

[K C]

Hi,

Is this a Solax controller ?

I had some problems with my controller but I managed to get data out. 

Kees

[StevenHowell]

No, this is a product called Ampinvt I found on Amazon. I think the parent contract manufacturer is a company called Power One in China.

Next to little information on this guy. I found out what kind of microcontroller it has and going through the documentation for that. It appears that you can program this microcontroller through the serial port so it might be a parameter set on the UART. 

How did you get yours to work? 

[K C]

My Solar panel converter is from Solax. I retrieve the data through a WiFi port.  The local Solax agent told me that was not possible when I asked for documentation. 

There was enough to find on the internet and browsing through the Firmware file also revealed some commands.

Most microcontrollers I know are not that easy to program. A serial port for programming is most likely a functionality of the firmware of that board.

Kees