EFOY integration
Last updated
Last updated
The Giraffe Edge Controller and cloud platform can be integrated with EFOY methanol fuel cell generators. For more details on EFOY please see the SFC Energy website: https://www.sfc.com.
If you have an EFOY connected to a device, it will show up on the system status page. When the fuel cell is operating you will see the green power bars showing power coming out of the EFOY.
When the EFOY is not generating it consumes between 0.3 and 0.6 watts to sustain itself. This is why a negative.
The Run Time figure is the run time of the EFOY methanol stack, not the time it has been plugged in for.
You can hover over the fuel level to see the capacity of the fuel cartridge configured
When the EFOY is running, you will see it showing a net positive power output
On the EFOY tab in the menu you can see lots more information about the EFOY as well as configuring some settings.
Any active errors will show in at the top. If there are no errors the green message is shown.
The Operating mode button allows you to change between Auto and Sleep mode. Sleep mode is equivalent to disabling the EFOY. Note that whilst in sleep mode the EFOY may still start up if it needs to enter frost protection mode.
The Charge now button lets you manually trigger a charge cycle. It is only available if the battery voltage measured by the EFOY is below a certain threshold (typically around 13.5V). If the charge now button is pressed whilst the EFOY is in sleep mode it will automatically transition to auto mode before starting.
The Reset button initiates a reset of the EFOY controller. This can clear many error messages and is the first port of call when it comes to troubleshooting.
The Lock button allows you to enter transport lock mode. Whils the EFOY is entering transport lock mode, it's status will show as Transport lock procedure.
When it has finished entering transport lock mode, it will enter Transport Lock mode.
Once in transport lock mode, it must be unlocked before it can be used again.
When the methanol fuel cartridge is replaced, you can reset it to 100% capacity or whatever quantity is left in the cartridge. The fuel cell will then reduce the remaining quantity as it is used up.
You can also set the size of the methanol cartridge installed. The available options are 5l, 10l, 28l and 60l.
You can see the error history of the EFOY on the error history section. Each error code is decoded so you can see a description of what may have caused it and how to fix it. You can also see the time at which it first occurred (converted to your local timezone) as well as the running hour at which is occurred.
You can click on the error code to go through to the SFC Energy website where they may be more details about the error code.
On the EFOY stats section, you can see all the informaton we pull from the fuel cell. This is just the raw data that the EFOY provides and may be helpful for troubleshotting.
The Edge Controller can automatically configure the EFOY to your predefined settings. Giraffe need to setup the device definition for your system and this template will then be applied to all EFOYs that are connected to systems using this definition.
The parameters that we can configure are as follows:
These parameters will be checked every time the Edge Controller boots and corrected if they do not match.
Any actions that are taken by an operator such as adjusting the remaining fuel capacity or initialising a charge cycle will create an entry in the event log.
Actions that the EFOY initiates by itself will not be logged, but they may be visible in the metrics graphs.
The EFOY must be connected to the Edge Controller via the RS232 connection. This is exposed on one of the RJ11 style connectors. For RS232, we only need RxD, TxD and Ground.
The EFOY must be enabled in the system definition for your product in the Giraffe platform before the Edge Controller will try and connect to it. Please reach out to Giraffe support to get it setup initially.
