SolarAssistant is not a brand most readers of this newsletter will have heard of, but a lot of them are already running it: it's a small independent monitoring layer, sold as a one-time $15 license (two years of updates included, renewable for $14–24/year after), that runs on a Raspberry Pi and translates the proprietary RS485/serial protocols used by budget hybrid inverters — Deye, Growatt, EG4, Sol-Ark, MPP Solar and the wider family of Voltronic-clone units, SRNE, and others — into something a normal dashboard or automation system can use.
On 2 July, the project shipped two related things at once. First, v0.2.0 of its official Home Assistant integration (its GitHub repository's second tagged release), which exposes live PV power, battery state of charge, grid and load power, voltage, current, and temperature as native Home Assistant entities over a local or cloud WebSocket connection — no separate MQTT broker required — plus cumulative energy totals that plug directly into HA's built-in Energy Dashboard. Second, a same-day 2026-07-02 Beta firmware release for the SolarAssistant unit itself, adding REST, WebSocket, and Cloud APIs, a command-line tool, email notification automations, and expanded settings support across Growatt, SRNE, Sumry, Luxpower, Voltronic, Solis, and GoodWe inverters. It's explicitly a beta, not the stable channel.
The context that makes this worth a Lead rather than a footnote: this newsletter has covered a steady stream of DIY builders writing their own monitoring dashboards specifically because vendor apps and BMS/inverter/shunt ecosystems don't talk to each other — an r/diysolar builder unifying three vendor apps into one dashboard in May, a German electric-boat builder hand-decoding motor telemetry onto a Victron Cerbo GX in last week's edition. An official, documented API on a monitoring layer this widely deployed under budget inverters removes a chunk of that reverse-engineering incentive at a stroke.