I am a complete beginner in the field of home assistant being just happy to manage the installation of HACS and the Victron integration.
Actually I am struggling to integrate my battery (no BMS just Lynx Shunt) into the energy view.
I already found two entitys/sensors, which I thougt could be useful:
sensor.victron_smart_shunt_history_chargedenergy
and
sensor.victron_smart_shunt_history_dischargedenergy
Unfortunately both sensors seem not to deliver any data.
Noob question: Why are those sensors are existing even if they don’t seem to deliver any data?
Are there any other sensors which I can use to connect as a battery sensor for charged/discharged energy in my dashboard?
The victron HACS integration uses a preconfigured list of entities, it does not ‘pol’ your system to find available dbus entities to build a database from, it uses modbus-tcp coupled with this list. I used the HACS integration for all of 3 days, realizing it’s limitations. I went the road of mqtt and built .yaml files for each victron device in my system. Much smoother, and I can modify it any way I need. Mqtt works much better than modbus-tcp.
If you or anyone else is interested, I can post some links to get you in the right direction. For a newbie it may seem intimidating, but if I can figure it out anyone else can as well.
Thanks Derrick,
some helpful links to get started with will be nice.
What kind of devices do you have? Maybe you can share one of your .yaml files, matching one of my devices, so it‘s easier for me to find a starting point.
Parts of my setup:
Here is a link explaining how to bridge the cerbo mqtt to the HA broker. I will need to strip my identifying information from the yaml before sharing so it will take me a little time.
here are a few yaml files to get you going. Some entities for the cerbo, multiplus, and smart shunt. Unzip the file and place the victron folder with it’s contents in the configuration folder of the HA. Use a file editor to find/replace ‘id_number_here’ and replace it (including the quotations, so when you are finished there should be NO quotations) with your vrm I’d number in each of the yaml files in the victron folder. Open the configuration yaml and add the following
mqtt: !include_dir_list victron
when making changes to yaml files it is not necessary to reboot HA, just reload the yaml’s by going to ‘developer tools’, click on the yaml tab, select restart/quick reload. Before doing any of this described here make sure you are receiving messages to the HA broker as described in the previous post link.
Also verify the device number for each victron device, yours may be different than mine. If so, you can again use find/replace to easily make the necessary changes. Anything that can be seen via the mqtt client can be added to the yaml to discover and add more entities to the HA devices list. Entities can also be removed (for example if your devices don’t display certain entities) by simply removing these entries from the yaml. I highly recommend making a backup before making changes to a yaml just in case something goes wrong.