(Placeholder) OutBack Power Systems models are inaccurate, out of date

[ke6jjj]

Summary

While it appears that OutBack Power Systems was once an active member of the SunSpec alliance, it appears that they have not bothered to tell the alliance about changes they have made to their models over the years, nor are they likely to fix them. Active development and support of their hardware seems to have ceased.

I am going to suggest several changes to the models in this repository, but before doing so I feel that as a non-member of the alliance, it might be very difficult for you to accept my patches. Thus, I will document why I believe these changes are needed very carefully in this issue, then reference it in each PR henceforth.

Provenance

I have managed to save as much documentation and example code as I could as a customer of OutBack's for over a decade. To that end I have three development packages that document the ModBus registers in their products. Unfortunately, since all of these files were downloaded under a click wrap license, I am not at liberty to release them. However, it's likely that these archives remain on the Internet in various forms, so I will describe them here.

Package	Approximate release date	Size	SHA256 Hash
AXS Port Development Package 97.zip	2012-11-27	373534	3bd2252077c9adb2a05b4b15cc89de03c30ef6832c328bf8d7d1957caf2bf0e4
AXS_Port_Development_Package_100.zip	2015-08-24	448116	1e35a97fc433da46b26f86a00b9d578e09e701b16aac5690e9170bf61f97c73d
AXS Port Development Package 105.zip	2016-02-24	447360	b50cd19259444888cd98bae64fa6867988dac48bf01f5e0d74e03eee53a8ceca

[jsbosch]

Those dev packages are very old. Later versions have many changes, including support for the SunSpec DER models (700-level). After Enersys bought Alpha, the parent company to OBP, they shut down the company and sold the brand to OutBack Power USA out of Texas.

[ke6jjj]

Those dev packages are very old. Later versions have many changes, including support for the SunSpec DER models (700-level). After Enersys bought Alpha, the parent company to OBP, they shut down the company and sold the brand to OutBack Power USA out of Texas.

I agree that the packages I have are old. Yet the models currently in the source tree appear even older! So I'm still advocating that a lot of updating is required.

[jsbosch]

Updating could be required, but to what values? Without the source code to the Mate3s or the updated SDK, you could make changes that affect other users. Though I'd be very surprised if anybody is still writing client software for those devices considering that they are unlikely to pass SB testing.

[ke6jjj]

Updating could be required, but to what values? Without the source code to the Mate3s or the updated SDK, you could make changes that affect other users. Though I'd be very surprised if anybody is still writing client software for those devices considering that they are unlikely to pass SB testing.

Issue #274 highlights one necessary change. OutBack inserted a field that moves all registers after it forward, including several enums, which fail to parse on modern hardware because they aren't enums in that location!

Even in the 105 package, I see definitions for these blocks, all of which aren't even defined in the current JSON specs:

#define SUNSPEC_OUTBACK_FX_DID                          (64113)
#define SUNSPEC_OUTBACK_FX_CONFIG_DID           (64114)
#define SUNSPEC_OUTBACK_GS_SPLIT_DID            (64115)
#define SUNSPEC_OUTBACK_GS_CONFIG_DID           (64116)
#define SUNSPEC_OUTBACK_GS_SINGLE_DID           (64117)
#define SUNSPEC_OUTBACK_FNDC_DID                        (64118)
#define SUNSPEC_OUTBACK_FNDC_CONFIG_DID         (64119)
#define SUNSPEC_OUTBACK_SYS_CONTROL_DID         (64120)
#define SUNSPEC_OUTBACK_OPTICSRE_STATS_DID      (64255)

[jsbosch]

Regarding the AXS Port, development was halted when the processor ran out of program memory and management deemed the sales quantities too low to either update the processor or refine the firmware.

[jsbosch]

To your above comment, I believe OBP stopped submitting model definitions sometime around 2016, the year before I joined. We had blocks of DIDs reserved but only a few were submitted to SunSpec.

There are others, too, related to equipment that was created but never sold.