The Hawkes Bay has officially entered beta testing! Ryan has the very first unit to leave Midnite engineering and it is now charging his batteries. As expected there are a few bugs to work out but this is an exciting step forward toward release! Follow along as we post updates over the next several weeks. We expect a new video out today as he takes it to full power!
Video here:
https://youtu.be/lGEMjAuDtG8 (https://youtu.be/lGEMjAuDtG8)
Hi Sunshine, Ryan, and the whole MN Crew,
Hawkes Bay is beautiful, solid looking hardware!
Obviously, getting the first Beta unit out is a huge accomplishment, GREAT WORK !
Have been eyeing this CC, or the Barcelona for a new project.
Will follow the progress on both of both of these great new CCs.
Thanks MidNite for these and all of the other new products you have in the pipeline. ALL are well woth waiting for. Have a great Christmas, errr Holiday Season, and a terrific New Year.
Thanks again, (73), Vic
so, what makes Hawkes Bay different from Classic ?
Hi Mike,
Brochure:
http://www.midnitesolar.com/pdfs/hawkes_bay.jpg
Merry Christmas, HNY, Vic
Hi Mike,
The most substantial difference is that the Hawkes Bay allows for 600v input. This means much fewer strings of panels and easier wiring of your PV array.
AND, it has external battery voltage sense, a very big step, to me.
Also Hawkes Bay has 3 Aux input/outputs
ALL, as in the Brochure, Linked above.
Excellent work MidNite !! Thanks, Vic
Has Ryan done any more videos or testing?
As to be expected, we found a few bugs in the initial testing which engineering has been working feverishly to fix. Because the initial units were not field updatable(one of the issues that is now fixed) we have sent our unit back to get fancied up. We are expecting the new unit to ship out early next week and then approximately 1 week transit. After that expect a new video to roll out shortly!
Thanks for the update, Sunshine!
Vic
Ryan's SN 001 has been returned to MidNite. Mario has made numerous improvements in the past month and since the original was not upgradeable in the field, we had him send it back. That unit will be put on the wall in building 6. It is special. We will send him another unit this week. It will be upgradeable in the field. We also should have a ComBox to send him. Very beta-ish, but hey if we can see something on the internet, we will be very happy. I was convinced 3.5 years ago to not place Ethernet in all new products as things need to be networked. The engineers who talked me into this said the ComBox was only a 3 month project! Well, we are about to ship our first beta unit next week. So much for engineers and timelines.
The picture of a pre-wired HB on the bench is the 110 amp version. It is going to a beta test site in Florida. Three more will be going out this next week. They are working pretty well now. I think they are 95% production ready. It is time to get ETL or UL scheduled. I would like to have the HB and Barcelona tested at the same time though, so that may delay us another month? We have new Production ready power boards designed that will be ordered this week. New production control boards are already on order and so are gate driver boards. Things are looking good for this product.
A little more about a pre-wired Hawke's Bay system. We feel strongly that customers should use our breaker box as it contains a 600V 30 amp shunt trip breaker. The Hawke's Bay has a special circuit inside that does not rely on any other electronics to be functioning. Its job is to monitor battery voltage. If the battery voltage gets too high, that special circuit trips the breaker and thus disconnects the PV input. The reason for this is that if a controller fails, and they all can do that, the controllers could put PV voltage on the battery. I would not want to have PV voltage on a battery, especially a Lithium battery. I am hoping to add up all the retail prices of the HB, breaker box, back plate and SPD and that would be the retail price of a pr-wired system. No labor or other parts would be entered into the retail price. As an added incentive, we would also give a couple year's additional warranty. We do not yet know the retail price of any new products yet, but you can bet they will be priced as low as possible. We have a new guy working on bills of materials for all the new projects. That will help us to get pricing established. This new guy is Tony Boatwright. Tony and I both started at Trace Engineering in 1990. Tony spent 15 years there and then left to go to Magnum Energy where he spent another 15 years. Tony is helping to insure nothing falls through the cracks with all of our development projects. He is working with all 26 engineers in this endeavor. Good luck Tony!
Robin,
Nice update. The passion to get it right comes through loud and clear.
Side note, I am in Australia today watching the commercials during the game, they are looking to have three million NEW home solar installations in the next few years. Get busy making awesome hardware, the demand is here.
We got our 80 amp Hawkes Bay back, This one can be updated with a cell phone and has a working com box plugged in. Still some code work to do for sure but so far its going well. Current limit is set to 75 amps and it is making 80 amps so its under promising and over delivering. This one has the older boards with the older shunts so I am told the accuracy will be spot on with the new boards. Mario currently has the fans running way to early and also at close to 15 volts. They will be variable speed soon and that will help a lot with that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfluRXN0Z5Y
GREAT video today !
Good to see all the work that is being done. Some of that work I have not even seen before, like the web interface.
Things are really taking shape !
Hi Ryan,
Terrific progress !! Looking great. Congrats to the whold MN Hawkes Bay Team.
Thanks for posting the video, Ryan. 73 Vic
Great progress!!
Looks good. I will be looking for a 600v CC this spring/summer as I am adding ~5700w of panels. I already have the panels, but the ground needs to thaw first.
Will the whizbangjr be integrated?
thx
Quote from: jtdiesel65 on March 03, 2021, 03:07:56 PM
Looks good. I will be looking for a 600v CC this spring/summer as I am adding ~5700w of panels. I already have the panels, but the ground needs to thaw first.
Will the whizbangjr be integrated?
thx
Yes. The WB Jr. will be usable on these. Not sure if that software is done yet but it will be sometime for sure.
Also remote battery voltage sense I believe.
So we have some new firmware, They forgot to put an upper limit on the current limit so I decided its time for full send and see what happens. So far we have seen about 105 amps out of the unit today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_IkuMOfM_w
Nice update! What a device.
Can't wait to see full voltage and wattage. Let'er rip tater chip!!
Did you happen to get temps during the high amp run?
We will have two versions. 80 and 110 amp. Ryan has been running his 75 amp unit at105 amps. Gets hot, but still running fine. He will be getting a 110 amp unit soon. Jim parish should have received his 120 amp special unit by now?
We just received new power boards in so will be back I print more beta units real soon. Once we get the Barcelona power board here we can think about going to etl. I don’t know how far Todd has got on manuals and bough?
Menus aren’t totally done and not all functions work yet, but I hat won’t stop us from going to etl.
Will the Hawkes Bay unit have a wind mode as with the Classic's? Nice work regardless. Best, ~ks
Quote from: kitestrings on March 12, 2021, 08:44:27 PM
Will the Hawkes Bay unit have a wind mode as with the Classic's? Nice work regardless. Best, ~ks
It certainly could !
That software will have to wait though for some future upgrade I'm afraid.
Robin said,
"We will have two versions. 80 and 110 amp". WOW !! Awesome, keep up all the great work. Congratulations to all of the MidNite team.
Can hardly wait ... Vic
Interested parties want to know, how's it going is there anything new or needed fix to the unit when are they going to be release?
Will this unit talk with the other Classics, sure hate to toss my Classic since it won't integrate it in.
Sounds like Progress is still being made, Hopefully I get mine back in a few weeks. Engineering wanted to update a few things on it. As for talking to the classic yes the long term goal is to have the com box speak to the classic so coordination can be had. The Classic is RS232 speaking Modbus and the Hawkes Bay is RS485 speaking canbus so they need a translator
Quote from: FNG on April 23, 2021, 08:39:05 AM
Sounds like Progress is still being made, Hopefully I get mine back in a few weeks. Engineering wanted to update a few things on it. As for talking to the classic yes the long term goal is to have the com box speak to the classic so coordination can be had. The Classic is RS232 speaking Modbus and the Hawkes Bay is RS485 speaking canbus so they need a translator
Where can we get a translator from? If that's the case then I am more than ready to buy one, just going to wait and hobble along till then.
Considering that there will be a com box and the Hawke's Bay is a canbus protocol, does that mean there is potential for it to communicate with Xantrex XW (now the Schneider Conext XW) or maybe SMA products? I currently have Xantrex XW6048 and Classic hardware but would like to grow the panel array and see the Hawkes Bay as a good way to reduce/eliminate combiner boxes and make use of the Sunspec capabilities for shutdown. If it happens to improve communications between units that would be a nice added benefit.
Quote from: jbnMidnite on May 03, 2021, 12:01:59 PM
Considering that there will be a com box and the Hawke's Bay is a canbus protocol, does that mean there is potential for it to communicate with Xantrex XW (now the Schneider Conext XW) or maybe SMA products? I currently have Xantrex XW6048 and Classic hardware but would like to grow the panel array and see the Hawkes Bay as a good way to reduce/eliminate combiner boxes and make use of the Sunspec capabilities for shutdown. If it happens to improve communications between units that would be a nice added benefit.
Wouldn't that be great if it did that ?
We have talked with these other companies about communications but for things like this, they all seem to not want anybody to communicate directly with their products on their bus.
Hopefully that could change some day but I would not hold my breath.
We do however communicate directly with the SMA Sunny Island for using Classics as solar charge controllers so could actually be able to do that with the newer controllers I suppose.
Any news?
Is there a eta on when it will hit stores?
thx
Mario, The lead engineer on the Hawkes Bay and Barcelona is here at our site for 2 weeks working out some of the final bugs and kinks. I believe we will see a Barcelona and a Hawkes bay running here Saturday. If my memory is correct these should be going to ETL in a few weeks. Will have to get some pictures. I just got done watering the array to cool it and get the VOC right to 595
SO, how did it go last weekend? No more mythical blue smoke I hope.
Quote from: Highflyer on June 15, 2021, 11:57:14 PM
SO, how did it go last weekend? No more mythical blue smoke I hope.
Mythical ?!? You mean like Unicorns ?
Would be funny to see unicorns come out of a Barcelona or Hawkes Bay
:D :)
Mario has the Hawkes Bay tuned well it is now tracking from 185v to 585v (We went from 165 to 595 but engineers wanted a small buffer) he has it waking up reliably, tracking very well and going to bed nicely. He has spent the last 2 days hiding in my camper writing code for the Barcelona, he is about ready today to try dual MPPT. Based on what I see here he needs to add kWh to the menu and I am giving the green light to start working on Beta sites (I will have a meeting today with Robin and Tony to put a schedule in place)
Firmware updates are so easy with the blue tooth and cell phone app, I will have to make a video on that in a bit.
Hardware is really cool, The control board between the Hawkes bay and Barcelona is interchangeable and the software is also, Mario has done a great job with this project.
Here is a video from day 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN0wkOgPZ-s
I should note, While Mario is here to work we did make him take a few minutes for recreation, he has never been out on an ATV. He had never been out target practicing either so we fixed that as well ;D
Oh geez, beer and driving and shooting. What could possibly go wrong?
Hope Mario had fun.
We made sure it wasn't in that order LOL