I’m wondering if there’s a way to create a demo VRM installation out of devices I don’t own for the purpose of demonstration. I’ve seen the individual demo devices in VictronConnect, but I’m looking for a complete system basically.
Hi @codefoster,
There are several ways to do this, the method that @M_Lange has shown is the most straight forward.
Perhaps if you gave a bit more info about your intentions on why or who or how you want to demo, I might be able to expand further with some of the more advanced options.
Thank you, @M_Lange. That worked and I’m able to browse those demo installations using the API by signing in as the demo user. @guystewart, my intention is to put together some Node Red flows that take advantage of these installations that include a lot of hardware I don’t own so I can show the value of Node Red. So, that was going to be my next question - how do I connect a Node Red instance to an installation other than my own - to a demo installation? I might be able to figure it out on my own, but if you know how I’d love that.
Adding to this. I’m finding that to do this, I can install Node Red on my dev PC and then connect it to the demo VRM installations. I don’t have it working yet. We’ll see.
I do this to check some flows. I installed Venus OS onto an RPI 2 and enabled node-red. I can log into the device via VRM portal. You are stuck with the components they have, but they are close enough to what I have to see how things work. I would like to see if you can customise a demo mode that would be something. I will be checking how you go and if its possible.
I’m afraid it’s not possible to do what I was hoping. @guystewart, I’d love to be told otherwise.
As far as I can tell, the Cerbo uses DBus and a locally hosted MQTT broker to facilitate Node-RED flows. If I sniff the VRM in the browser, I see that it’s doing some chatter on wss://webmqtt47.victronenergy.com/mqtt?idUser=22 but that’s over HTTP websockets and not MQTT proper and to use it you need the API key for that installation, which of course we dont’ have for the public demo installations.
It’s great to show these demos to clients in VRM. If it were possible to show off what’s possible by also interacting with them using Node-RED, that would be even better.