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slewinson avatar image
slewinson asked

How best can I integrate unsupported CANbus or BLE data sources?

Hi all.

I am trying to integrate a diverse range of data sources into my VenusGX that hopefully will become the heart of my RV.
Some of these devices include a Lippert Tire Linc TPMS, the Renault OBD CANbus data (alternator load, temps etc) and the existing BMPro CANbus based power management system.

Pointers to either a way to use the existing CANbus / BLE infrastructure, or anthing else would be welcome.

VE.Cansystem integrationBluetooth Low Energy - BLE
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bathnm avatar image
bathnm answered ·

Neither are going to be simple. The CAN integration is closed source. The BLE side of things that listens for and stores temperature and tank data from various venire can be found and modified, if you have a good working knowledge of BLE and Python.

Other than that it is to start creating your own driver and writing to the dBus, which the GUI then pulls data from. The dBus paths available and a Python library are also available, do some searching.

You re generally going to be on your own. Not many people do this and you need a good knowledge of BLE or CAN and dbus to make this work. A lot of the specifications for the messages sent over BLE and CAN are proprietary and not really available so be prepared for a lot of reverse engineering.

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slewinson avatar image slewinson commented ·

@Bathnm thanks. I suspected as much.

Reverse engineering is nothing new to me, and I have already done a chunk of the CANbus work for two sources.

I saw the BLE source but all of the bits that need to be tinkered with are inside the velib code. This leads me to think that this is not the path to pursue. Although it requires an ESP32 or similar as a gateway, dbus-mqtt-devices looks much more manageable and maintainable.

https://github.com/freakent/dbus-mqtt-devices

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