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Michael Scott avatar image
Michael Scott asked

Raspberry pi connection to bmv-712 without running full Venus OS

I'm wanting to connect to a BMV-712 smart with bluetooth to my already setup Raspberry pi.


Currently have the latest version of Rasbain running, with a Octoprint server ( 3d printer server ). Plus a number of other sensors, and servers. I have a lot of time and configuration setup in this current install. I don't want to have to re start installing it all if I don't have to.

Is there a way to connect to the bmv, without installing all of the Venus OS. ? Or do I have to running it all, and rebuild if possible all the other servers on top of it ?


End goal, connect via bluetooth, collect the data and display it, and use it to control other items such as replay's. Plus trend the usage.

BMV Battery MonitorRaspberry PiBluetooth
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greg-1 avatar image
greg-1 answered ·

The question is abit old, but nevertheless: it seems someone has already done something like that (monitoring of BMV and MPPT, with a nice interface), albeit using VE.Direct USB cables instead of bluetooth. I haven't tried it yet though (but I plan to do it in the near future). Oh, and it's in French, but Google can Translate :).

https://david.mercereau.info/pvmonit-v1-0-monitoring-de-mon-installation-photovoltaique-autonome/

https://github.com/kepon85/PvMonit


There's more here:

https://www.victronenergy.com/live/open_source:start

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Russell avatar image Russell commented ·

I think the VE.Direct on is 5 Volt and it would need a level shift circuit to 3.3 Volt for the raspberry pi?

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masterov avatar image
masterov answered ·

I would be curious to know how you solved this problem in the end.


I was able to connect Raspberry running regular Raspberry OS (not Venus) to BMV 712 Smart using 3 wires using these instructions, and get all the data from the built-in serial port http://masterov.blogspot.com/2020/03/connect-vedirect-to-raspberry-pi.html

I would like to know if you were able to connect it using bluetooth.


Btw. I also tried using Venus OS to connect to BMV using bluetooth and it didn't work.

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outsourcedguru avatar image
outsourcedguru answered ·

As an OctoPrint forum moderator, I wouldn't suggest "doing other things" with your OctoPrint Pi computer; just let it stream the gcode to your printer. This is one of those times when you could easily dedicate another Pi for the other things you'd like to do.

That said, I will suggest to everyone on here that the Pi has two UARTs: a good one and a cheap one. If Bluetooth is enabled, it often tries to take the good one, leaving the cheap one for serial communications on GPIO, for example. There is a way to adjust the `config.txt` so that Bluetooth is still on but uses the cheap UART as well, though. From what I understand, Victron's people who created the Venus OS probably didn't understand this and just shut off BLE to make it work.

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sparky961 avatar image
sparky961 answered ·

Old thread, but for anyone who's stumbled here via search engine you can check out my lightweight VE.Direct to MQTT bridge for Raspberry Pi (and maybe extended to other platforms later)

https://github.com/TheWandrr/vebus_to_mqtt

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milad avatar image milad commented ·

Hello,

Can I connect the BMV-712 to Raspberry pi GPIO directly? Or should I use the VE.direct to USB cable? I need to use a python code instead of using Victron OS on raspberry pi.

Thanks in advance,

Milad

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