For a professional project a client asked us whether we could integrate a ComAp intellilite MRS16 into our Cerbo GX display. This question came shortly after having read a article about ComAp integration into Victron, so we excitedly said yes to the customer. However, what I did not expect was that it was an older type (intellilite 3 instead of 4) which was not natively supported in VenusOS. This caused some headaches because the ordered Ethernet card didn’t work and we had to purchase the older type. After that also didn’t work, I went looking for alternative solutions to make the systems talk to each other and send a message to @ptrenz who had worked on the generator integration. He pointed me to the “virtual generator“ in Victron’s NodeRed integration. This however wasn’t available in the official release yet, but after updating to the public beta 3.70, I was able to create this generator and was able to set it up using a NodeRed modbus integration that feeds into the generator statistics. Now the client is able to view (most of) their generator information and the fuel level which was a big thing for them. Really awesome for Victron to give us the power to integrate a system ourselves this way and make it look and feel as if it was always part of the VenusOS software. The start-stopping for this particular genset was a bit difficult to get working, but because of NodeRed it works as expected every time! If anyone needs to setup a simular generator or one of the older ComAp controllers, I might be able to provide you with the start and stop code/registers because they are fairly well hidden in the manual. Let me know if there’s anyone interested in that and I can share it here.
Cheers @ptrenz for your response and great work on the integration and hopefully more people will be able to implement something simular using this method!