1. Bluetooth® NetID: the electronic picket fence
With the SMA Bluetooth wireless communications standard, solutions for system monitoring are especially easy to realize. This is because devices compatible with Bluetooth are easy to network, independently and rapidly, to form a reliable wireless network. In order to separate systems which are adjacent to each other, however, first you must establish a standardized network ID (NetID) for all inverters within one system. All inverters with the same Net ID then form a common wireless network.
Simply configured, simply connected
At the inverter, you set the NetID using a small rotary switch, which can be turned using a screwdriver (Figs. 1 and 2). The numbers from 2 to 9 are available, as are the letters from A to F, that is, 14 different values. The NetID "0" is used to turn off the Bluetooth functionality, with the 1 (factory setting) the inverter establishes a maximum of two data connections to computers with the Sunny Explorer software. The query devices (e.g., Sunny Beam with Bluetooth, computer with Sunny Explorer or the forthcoming Sunny WebBox with Bluetooth) are not set manually, but rather, they adopt the NetID of the inverters within range. If available, the different NetIDs from which to choose are listed. Since you should disconnect the inverters completely (on the DC and AC sides) after a change of NetID and must restart them afterwards, you should check for the presence of other Bluetooth networks before commissioning. To do this, use one of the query devices mentioned above.