ScreenLogic Protocol Adapter

[MyAZPool]

Looking for thoughts or input regarding the Pentair ScreenLogic Protocol Adapter:

Is the Pentair Protocol Adapter just a standard RS485 Ethernet adapter such as the gridconnect 485?

Does anyone know who actually makes it?

Just trying to save a few bucks on a test project that I'm working on. The Pentair ScreenLogic Interface Kit (520500) (which is nothing more than the PA, CD and Cat-5 cable) sells for about 440.00 or more.

A regular old RS485 to Ethernet Adapter runs about $100.00. I'm of the opinion that this should work just fine but not completely sure.

Unless someone has a spare Pentair Protocol Adapter lying around that they are looking to get rid of?

Thanks for any comments or advice.
r.

 

[Katodude]

Now I am intrigued. Love it when you work on a project.

Any reason you dont just use a USB to rs-485 adaptor. Those are only $10.

 

[ogdento]

The protocol adapter is a single board computer based on a Rabbit 3000 processor... it's not a simple converter. At risk of oversimplifying, it provides a web ui to make changes to an Easytouch or Intellitouch system and then transmits that data (using Pentair's specific data format) to the system board via rs485. It also seems to be overly susceptible to firmware corruption

 

[ogdento]

If you want to try at put your own thing together, an rs485 to usb adapter would work great if you want to see and send data. You can use it with a pc, Beaglebone or Raspberry PI, etc. Or you could connect an rs485 chip to an arduino/ESP32 type device.

This website has lots of great info on pentair protocols, but there are many others out there (i can only get to it through the way back machine nowadays):

How I Control The Pool | sdYoung.com

REQUISITE DISCLAIMER: THE ACTIONS I'VE TAKEN ON MY PENTAIR EASYTOUCH-BASED POOL CONTROLLER AND PERIPHERALS WERE UNDERTAKEN WITH THE CLEAR AND LUCID

web.archive.org

 

[MyAZPool]

Now I am intrigued. Love it when you work on a project.

Any reason you dont just use a USB to rs-485 adaptor. Those are only $10.

Hi A.
Lol... Yea, I just have lots of time on my hands now to play and experiment now since the wife has been called away to active duty with the Air Force, so no honey do's at the moment.

USB-485 adapter would be okay if I were going to position the adapter next to my machine (and I still might do that).

But my initial thinking was to connect the protocol adapter to the bus at the control panel and then use my existing cat-5 at the panel to get to the house and on to my LAN.

I want to see what happens once I have a direct connection and see If I can query the IP address from a browser which of course I can't do right now (although no problem pinging the IP). I am able to download all of the web scripts for IntelliCenter.Com using web2desk. If fact, my entire IntelliCenter web configuration is setting on my desktop at the moment.

I'm letting others work on the home brew side because that is a bit above my skill level. I just want to see if I can use the existing IntelliCenter.com web structure and host it locally on my own web server. If I can do that, then I can start working on changing some of the code in order to get past some of the glitches (and that part is just about above my pay grade as well).

Let me know what you think and stay safe.
r.

 

[MyAZPool]

The protocol adapter is a single board computer based on a Rabbit 3000 processor... it's not a simple converter. At risk of oversimplifying, it provides a web ui to make changes to an Easytouch or Intellitouch system and then transmits that data (using Pentair's specific data format) to the system board via rs485. It also seems to be overly susceptible to firmware corruption

Tom,
Thanks.... Yea, that's what I was afraid of. Sounds as if that is what I need in order to do what I'm trying to do.
Any idea what causes the firmware corruption and is that fixable?
Thanks again!!!!
r.

 

[MyAZPool]

If you want to try at put your own thing together, an rs485 to usb adapter would work great if you want to see and send data. You can use it with a pc, Beaglebone or Raspberry PI, etc. Or you could connect an rs485 chip to an arduino/ESP32 type device.

This website has lots of great info on pentair protocols, but there are many others out there (i can only get to it through the way back machine nowadays):

How I Control The Pool | sdYoung.com

REQUISITE DISCLAIMER: THE ACTIONS I'VE TAKEN ON MY PENTAIR EASYTOUCH-BASED POOL CONTROLLER AND PERIPHERALS WERE UNDERTAKEN WITH THE CLEAR AND LUCID

web.archive.org

Thanks Tom.
Currently I can observe the passing of data right now by using the chrome developer tools.
Thanks for that link. Very interesting. Also I been following the developments over at Github. There are some fairly promising developments there as well.

I have been able to communicate with the panel using a UI/MQTT bridge that was developed by another member here.
I just thought that I would see what I could do using a web-based approach.

I really appreciate your input and any further tips or advice that you might have would be helpful.
Thanks again and stay safe and well.
r.

 

[GDN]

Although I come from the IT world, most of this is beyond what I would dig in to. I understand some of it and wish I knew more, but do get at a high level what you are trying to do. @ogdento is right on from what I've seen and done with updates.

If you've not ever used / had the Protocol adapter I can tell you this might give you more insight to what @ogdento notes and might give you something to dig in to. Pentair provides updates to the device periodically. You can download the update from their web site. There is an updater that pulls the download file into pieces and then uploads them and commits them to the memory on the adapter. If you can download and explore that file/ pull it file apart you can see the code that they are running on it.

About a year after we put the pool in the adapter bricked, it was a known error from Pentair. They replaced it. I did not get to keep the old one or it would be all yours.

Sounds like a fun project.

 

[MyAZPool]

Although I come from the IT world, most of this is beyond what I would dig in to. I understand some of it and wish I knew more, but do get at a high level what you are trying to do. @ogdento is right on from what I've seen and done with updates.

If you've not ever used / had the Protocol adapter I can tell you this might give you more insight to what @ogdento notes and might give you something to dig in to. Pentair provides updates to the device periodically. You can download the update from their web site. There is an updater that pulls the download file into pieces and then uploads them and commits them to the memory on the adapter. If you can download and explore that file/ pull it file apart you can see the code that they are running on it.

About a year after we put the pool in the adapter bricked, it was a known error from Pentair. They replaced it. I did not get to keep the old one or it would be all yours.

Sounds like a fun project.

Thanks much Greg. Hmmm. So the protocol adapter actually gets updates? Is the "updater" some sort of a hardware device or how exactly does that work? Does a service tech have to do that? Sorry for the questions, but I'm not too savvy on the some of the more in-depth ET/IT devices and procedures but certainly curious.

I initially just thought the protocol adapter was a straight RS485 to ether adapter but @ogdento got me straight on that but had no idea that the PA was that sophisticated (so to speak).

Yea, hate to spend close to five bills on an experiment but maybe I can find a way.
Thanks again!!
r.

 

[GDN]

The update is done by the end user. I've done it a few times in 5 years. No special equipment is needed and it is done via a PC or a Mac, you just have to be on the same subnet as the adapter. Here is the Pentair link directly to the Screenlogic update and Step 1 is to update the Protocol adapter complete with links to download the latest firmware right from their site.

ScreenLogic Update

 

[GDN]

This process generates a log of the files it updates. I need to check mine - it may actually need to be updated. Don't have time to dig in to that tonight, but will double check tomorrow. If it needs an update and I can capture the log I'll share.

 

[MyAZPool]

The update is done by the end user. I've done it a few times in 5 years. No special equipment is needed and it is done via a PC or a Mac, you just have to be on the same subnet as the adapter. Here is the Pentair link directly to the Screenlogic update and Step 1 is to update the Protocol adapter complete with links to download the latest firmware right from their site.

ScreenLogic Update

Ah Ha. Now I got it. So you first update the PA and then the app on your desktop. Sorry, I just always assumed that the ScreenLogic update was for the desktop application only.
Guess if I tried to use the protocol adapter with the IntelliCenter and wanted to update the PA, I could just do step 1.
Thanks Greg!!
r.

 

[MyAZPool]

This process generates a log of the files it updates. I need to check mine - it may actually need to be updated. Don't have time to dig in to that tonight, but will double check tomorrow. If it needs an update and I can capture the log I'll share.

Yes, please. That would be great. I would be really interested in seeing that.
Thanks much!!
Ron...

 

[GDN]

Been frustrated a few minutes as I was trying to get Screenlogic to run on my Mac. I forgot about the 64bit debacle - Mac won't run any 32 bit SW and Pentair has not updated Screenlogic. I recall now having to do this last year from my work Windows machine. When I Googled to find the answer, it brought me right back here to the great TFP site for the answer to that.

I also found this in the thread, not sure if you are aware of it or not - Pentair Screenlogic and Mac Catalina. Look down at the last section to see the work @LostBard has done.

 

[dmk]

I’ve interfaced directly with the ET using an RPI + RS485 adapter and also through the Protocol Adapter.

The protocol adapter is basically wrapping the pentair binary protocol with some basic authentication / handshaking and encapsulating it over IP.

I won’t claim to understand all of the pentair protocol but there are lots of good resources in the open source community.

What are you looking to do?

 

[Katodude]

USB-485 adapter would be okay if I were going to position the adapter next to my machine (and I still might do that).

It might be a little ugly and dont know the configuration of your house, but you can go 4000 feet with an RS-485 signal. Just run a really long cable to your machine while you are messing around. I dont know if you have extra Ethernet wire lying around but that should work.

 

[ogdento]

I don't want to distract from what @dmk just said about his system (would love to learn more about your rpi setup!), but updates to the Rabbit boards in the PA are delivered via tcp, so if your PA gets gummed up and loses it's ethernet connection the device is essentially bricked. There seem to be a lot of ways to brick these things - bad updates, corrupted flash, etc. Once a device is bricked, it's not dead but one or both of the executables, HLFILE and HLDEVICE, are needed to reflash/reset the device. Those are not Pentair tools, but are part of the (very expensive) development tools for the rabbit processors... which I believe is why they're not distributed by Pentair? I was initially very interested in reverse engineering the PA, but once I learned how it was built and how closed/expensive the tool chain was I figured I had better ways to spend my time

 

[ogdento]

Here's a post from 2018 talking about hlfile/hldevice and some more details about the PA...

Intellitouch Screen Logic Problem

Hello All, Long time lurker here looking for some help - MODs if this is inappropriate for this forum please delete with my apologies We finally got our all Pentair system setup last year. Everything has been working beautifully until a few weeks ago when we had a few power surges/outages in...

www.troublefreepool.com

 

[MyAZPool]

I’ve interfaced directly with the ET using an RPI + RS485 adapter and also through the Protocol Adapter.

The protocol adapter is basically wrapping the pentair binary protocol with some basic authentication / handshaking and encapsulating it over IP.

I won’t claim to understand all of the pentair protocol but there are lots of good resources in the open source community.

What are you looking to do?

@dmk
Well, that's good info to know. Thanks for sharing what you know about it. What I'm trying to do is take my current IC Web Configs (I have captured all of the files), and instead of it being hosted on the Pentair web-servers, I would host it myself.
Based on what @ogdento has elaborated on (very useful info), that might work out better since I should be able to download and update the PA with any updates or reset the device, since I'm assuming it will have an IP address and it will be on my LAN.
Thoughts?
Thanks again for your input.
r.

 

[MyAZPool]

It might be a little ugly and dont know the configuration of your house, but you can go 4000 feet with an RS-485 signal. Just run a really long cable to your machine while you are messing around. I dont know if you have extra Ethernet wire lying around but that should work.

Sure, I can do that and probably will do something like that (if my tests work) or just pull a 4-conductor (22AWG) cable through that big ole 3/4" conduit that contains only a single cat-5 at the moment and runs from my load center and up into the attic. Thank goodness I pulled an extra pull-line in that conduit in case I do need to run an extra LV cable or two.