Wiring Elfin-EE11 to Pentair IntelliCenter

[guinness]

Inspired by the post wiring Elfin-EW11 to Pentair Easytouch I'm documenting my installation of the Elfin-EE11 which is the ethernet version.

I did this since the IntelliCenter came with an EnGenius ENS202EXT bridge to connect to the internet and came with a spare ethernet port.

I opted to use the RJ45 8PIN Connector with screw terminals. I used 4-wire telephone cable for both the ethernet and RS-485 connections.



Installation was very simple, I just had to pass the adapted ethernet cable through the raceway into the low voltage compartment.



I then connected another short cable to one of the RS-485 connectors on the main board.

Before going any further I assigned the device a static IP on my router using the MAC adddress from a label on the device. Once completed I closed up the control panel and powered it back up. Right away I could see that the device was powered as LAN2 was lit on the EnGenius bridge indicating ethernet connection.

And sure enough the router assigned an IP to the device using DHCP. Then it was simply a case of entering the IP into my web browser to access the admin web interface. That came up and I used the default username/password of admin/admin to access the configuration.

The only setting changes I needed to make were to change to baud rate from 115200 to 9600 and the flow control from Disable to Half-Duplex.

 

[guinness]

After the Elfin-EE11 was installed and configured the next step was to install and run nodejs-poolController. First I checked the status page in the admin interface that communication with the IntelliCenter was occurring.



Since I had a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W I installed njsPC onto that and the instructions below will cover that. I installed Raspberry Pi OS (bullseye) which is Debian based. I used the Raspberry Pi Imager to install it onto a microSD card which has the additional benefit of configuring the WiFi connection and enabling SSH for remote access.

After inserting the microSD card into the RPI and powering it on, I was able to get shell access via SSH. The first commands I ran were to update the package libraries.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

After that was completed I installed nodejs and npm packages and checked their versions.

sudo apt install nodejs
node -v
sudo apt install npm
npm -v

Then it was simply a case of getting a copy of the source code for nodejs-poolController and nodejs-poolController-dashPanel repositories in GitHub.

git clone https: //github.com/tagyoureit/nodejs-poolController
git clone https: //github.com/rstrouse/nodejs-poolController-dashPanel

Then finally building and running both projects so that they will run with NodeJS Express web server.

cd ~/nodejs-poolController
npm start &
cd ~/nodejs-poolController-dashPanel
npm start &

Once that was done you can simply open up the web browser with http://raspberrypi:5150/ to run the dash panel. From there you select the connection to the njsPC server running under port 4200 and then finally setting the RS485 port to point to the Elfin-EE11 that is connected to the IntelliCenter (you should see stats being updated reflecting data being transferred).

After that is all done you should then see njsPC update to include your IntelliCenter configuration and show it's status.

 

[guinness]

I also made an additional setting change for the TCP server on the Elfin device. The timeout value was changed from 0 to 300 seconds as the existing value of zero meant that the timeout function would be disabled.

Set TCP timeout, If exceed setted time and don’t received any network data package, It will break TCP connection.
If working in TCP client mode, it will reconnect immediately. If it work in TCP server mode, the TCP client need to create the connction.
Set this value to 0 is to close the function. The function is used for TCP to restore abnormal connection. Recommend to enable. Default: 300s, Range 0～600.

 

[ajw22]

Where did you buy the Elfin-EE11? The Amazon listings I found don't have it available.

 

[guinness]

It's available on Amazon in addition to eBay or AliExpress, but all with slow shipping.