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Paul Smith avatar image
Paul Smith asked

using ve bus without venus os

Hello there


I think this is quite a straight forward question, but hours of googling have left me none the wiser:-

Is it possible to view information on the VE Bus without using venus OS or another victron product?


I am using a raspberry pi which has a lot of other things running on it, which wouldn't work on venus and it doesn't seem worth going to the expense of buying a cerbo gx because I only want to monitor battery voltages etc...


VE direct seems like it will be quite easy with a few python scripts, but I don't really understand what the VE bus is. Is it like modbus. Presumably I could read the bus in a similar way - or not

Sorry for the noob questions

Any help would be much appreciated.

Kind regards


Paul





VE.Bus
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iuri avatar image iuri commented ·

I'm in the same situation and I was wondering too how to interface with my Victron devices from a non-Venus OS device.


I have a Raspberry Pi running Openplotter, which already comes with SignalK and Node-Red. I only have two Victron devices that I'd like to integrate, a smart-shunt and a Multiplus 1600, so I'd like to avoid running yet another Pi just for those two. I already have the smartshunt integrated via a VE.Direct to USB cable, and the vedirect-serial-usb SignalK plugin. That one was quite stright-forward.


Now I'd also like to integrate the Multiplus with both SignalK and Node-red. I already have the MK3 cable, but of course nothing is flowing into my system out of the box.


I'm wondering if we could make this work through D-Bus, by installing the mk2-dbus package provided by the Venus packages repo. I won't be able to test this until I go to the boat in a few weeks, so in the meantime, if somebody has some suggestions / ideas, will be highly appreciated.

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wkirby avatar image
wkirby answered ·

Check the Downloads section for technical information here: https://www.victronenergy.com/support-and-downloads/technical-information
Documents you might find interesting are "Data communication with Victron Energy products" and "Interfacing with VE Bus products - MK2 protocol"

Moving to Modifications section where other may have tried similar things.

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iuri avatar image
iuri answered ·

I made some progress on this the last few days. I managed to get both SmartShunt and Multiplus 1600 integrated with my existing system (Home Assistant and SignalK) by installing the Victron provided Venus Debian packages (https://github.com/victronenergy/venus/wiki/install-venus-packages-on-Debian). It was quite straight-forward after I realized that the `localsettings` package is a requirement for both the vedirect and mk2 services to run properly.

So, if you want to get data from a VE.Bus device with an existing Pi running Debian or Raspbian, get an MK3 Ve.Bus to USB cable and follow the Venus wiki page linked above to add the apt repo and install the `localsettings` and `mk2-dbus` packages. Note that the wiki page is not 100% complete when it comes to the daemontools service files needed to run those services, and that requires some extra manual tweaking. Check the `/opt/victronenergy/service-templates/mk2-dbus` folder to get an idea on how to configure them.

To make things easier though, I've created Docker images for all the Venus services that I need, and run them all as Docker containers. Check it out here (https://github.com/iuriaranda/venus-docker). Hope it's useful.

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Chris George avatar image Chris George commented ·
You wouldn't happen to have the dockerfile used to create the image would you? Working on a project with openwrt and a Raspberry pi4, and need to build the image for arm64/v8.
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iuri avatar image iuri Chris George commented ·

Sure, I added the links to the comment above but I just noticed that they haven't rendered correctly for some reason...


Here is the repo: https://github.com/iuriaranda/venus-docker


Sorry for the late reply

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everlanders avatar image everlanders Chris George commented ·
Also very interested in getting some basic info from the MK3 to a simple Python script... I would very much appreciate some more details on what is needed here.
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