If you are using this software to download the data from your
Aurora Inverter and have a public web site showing your data 
send me an email with the URL. I will be creating a web page 
on my Solar Web Site with those links. Tell everyone that you
know about this to do that also.                             
Email Solar at curtronics dot com with your URL.             

If you are using this software to download data from your
Aurora Inverter and are doing so using the USB port on the
inverter I would like to hear from you. I'm particularly 
interested it whether or not you are getting lots of CRC 
errors. I am working with one installation that is constantly
getting CRC errors on a USB connection and has to run the   
program multiple times before it successfully gets the data.
I'd like to determine where the problem is in order to work 
towards eliminating it.                                     
Email Solar at curtronics dot com with your info. Thank you.

The -k option is considered ** Experimental ** because it is
an un-Publicly documented option so it may or may not provide
correct information. It appears the inverter stores the past 
365 days of KWH prodcution data in a block of memory. The 
exact location of that memory block seems to differ in each 
inverter, it may be model related it may not. A pointer is 
available that points to the current days value but no offset
information has been found to indicate at what position in 
the block of memory that is. So the beginning and end of the 
block of memory is not accurately known. aurora attempts to 
watch for the end of the block and then loop back to the 
beginning of the block (round robin storage) to continue 
gathering data. This method works for inverters that have 
366 days (current day included) worth of data but for inveters
that don't the results of the readings are currently unknown.

Setting the time on the inverter using the -S option has been 
known to clear (reset to zero) the energy values reported by 
the -e option (except the Total Energy reported) and also the 
history reported by the -k option. It does do this on my 
inveter that has a manufacture date of 06 16. However on newer 
inverters it may no longer do this, i.e. zero the data. I know
of one inverter that has a manufacture date of 10 42 that 
setting the time via the -S option did not clear these data 
values.

**********************************

You can access the documentation via 'aurora -h' or the manpage,
or for more in depth documentation, read the code.             

There have been many reports of communications problems when
using the USB port on Aurora inverters. A work around was added
awhile back, the -Y option to get around this issue. Recently 
someone indicated that there needs to be a minimum of 400 uS  
between the sending of commands to the inverter when          
communicating via the USB port. With this information in hand 
the -P option was added and testing was conducted using the -P
option on inverters that are communicating via the USB port that
exhibit this problem. In some cases it corrected this USB       
problem, in other cases it did not correct the problem and the  
-Y option still had to be used. In short, the -P option will    
cause aurora to not send commands unless the time specified in  
the -P option has elapsed since the last command was sent. So,  
if you are experiencing problems with communicating via the USB 
port try using the -P option starting with a value of 400 and   
increase or decrease the value until reliable communication is  
attained. If that does not eliminate the problem then try using
the -Y option.                                                  

There have been reports saying that Power One is claiming the
USB port is not designed/should not be used for continuous data
gathering/communication. However, this has not been confirmed with
Power One.

Getting more reports from users that Power One is claiming the
USB port is not designed/should not be used for continuous data
gathering/communication. So more users are switching to RS-485 
adapters, that being said it has been reported that using RTS/CTS
control on the serial port when using a RS-485 adapter improves 
the communication reliability. So the -X option has been added to
enable RTS/CTS control on the serial port.

If aurora cannot communicate with the Aurora Inverter it dies a
silent death to STDOUT but reports the lack of response to STDERR.
This is on purpose for data collection purposes so you can pipe
the data to a file without having any error messages in the file.
If a CRC error is encountered it will also be reported on STDERR
regardless. If in doubt about what's going on, use the verbose
option to see.

This program has been tested using a standard serial port, i.e.
/dev/ttyS1, and a USB serial port, /dev/ttyUSB0 with equal success.
The USB serial port was the BB DYNEX variety, DX-UBDB9 using the
Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port. Development and
testing was done on a SuSE Linux 10.0 (custom gen'd kernel)
AMD Sempron 3000 laptop system, for ease of being able to test by
the Aurora Inverter, final destination has it running the data
collection on a SuSE Linux 10.0 (custom kernel) AMD Athlon(tm) XP
3000+ server.

An update to the platform in use, it is now SuSE Linux 11.3 with
their default kernel on a AMD Phenom 945.
