MPPTs disappeared from dashboard - my solution

DIY
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Just putting this here in case someone else goes traipsing around the internet looking for this solution. I didn’t find it recommended/had to work it out for myself, so if I can save anyone some time, it feels like the right thing to do.

I upgraded to Victron gear about two and a half years ago now and installed it myself. I’ve got 2x 12V systems - one with a SmartSolar, Multiplus II, SmartShunt, and 2x drop-in LiFePO4s, the other with a SmartSolar, a white label inverter, a SmartShunt, and 2x AGMs. Sooner rather than later these two systems will be broken out and installed on two separate outbuildings and we’ll upgrade to a single 48V system for the home, but that’s besides the point. Right after I installed it, I learned that the SmartSolars had a tendency to sync their charging profiles even though they were connected to two different battery banks (and two different battery chemistries), so I instituted different instances on the LiFePO4 and AGM systems to rectify that.

For almost two and a half years things have been working the way they should and I’ve been getting minute-by-minute reporting that makes me giddy. About six weeks ago my SmartSolars stopped reporting on my VRM dashboard and have shown missing in my Device List. I’ve fiddled with them as appropriate, but I couldn’t get them to come back. Since it was two that disappeared at the same time, on the same day, I figured it wasn’t the cables so I didn’t bother buying more. Everything else was reporting through the Cerbo, so I figured it wasn’t that. I’ve either been too busy, or it’s been too wet around here for the last 6 weeks for me to get out into my solar cabinet and try and work it out.

Today - after spending hours troubleshooting, I finally solved the problem - though I can’t tell you exactly which of the two things solved it. - but I think it was both.

When I instituted separate instances for each charge controller, I assumed that I would run a separate VE.Can from each SmartSolar to my CerboGX. It worked fine for, again, almost two and a half years until one day it just didn’t.

While digging around in the Remote Console today I could see that my SmartSolars were showing up under Settings → Connectivity → VE.Can Port, and I could see that there was a communication error under → Network status where all my TX were failing. A bit of time on Perplexity led me to believe that I needed to rework my VE.Can cables and daisy chain them, instead of running them individually to the Cerbo GX. So I did, then disabled my VE. Can CAN.Bus profile and re-enabled it. And suddenly the TX stopped failing and my SmartSolars reported in…briefly.

After messing around a bit more, I decided to change the instance number of the SmartSolars to something I hadn’t used before so I changed them from 0 and 1 to 2 and 3. I then disabled and re-enabled my CAN.Bus profile and rebooted the Cerbo GX. And that seems to have done it. Curiously the Cerbo GX has now taken instance 0, and the SmartSolars are still instance 2 and 3. But what do I care? My SmartSolars are now reporting on my dashboard again.

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Interesting. Thank you for sharing this. Was this perhaps introduced after an (automatic) firmware update?

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Can is required to be daisy chained, thats how you terminate either end of the bus. This is how it is designed and documented to work.

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I suspect that it was, but I just can’t be sure unfortunately. That said, it looks like there was a firmware update released on the 10th of June and that would fit my timeline of approximately 6 weeks ago.

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A good CAN system also works with drop cables. You could have four on a Cerbo GX MKII and terminate the main bus on either side. All four of them, the CAN cables can then connect to one of the busses. It’s the software that makes or breaks it.

Note: I have two CAN busses on my Cerbo GX MKII with different speed configuration setup.

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The new cerbo has a different hardware config to the old one, but as it stands, victron want the devices on any given bus daisy chained, as per the charger manuals.
If guidance isn’t followed, what works today, may not work tomorrow.
Current versions have had numerous changes for CAN, especially on MK2, and untested configs can run into problems.

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I get that, but… As long as the VM-3P75CT can’t be user configured, some people will have to use two CAN busses. One for their (master) BMS and one for the meters. This was why I replaced my old Cerbo with a new MKII. Because I needed the meters. Both daisy chained of course :wink:

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Spoke too soon. Seems that it hung in there all night, and until two hours before I checked again the next morning. But, MPPT data is gone from my dashboard again.

I did just now get it to come back by changing the instance numbers again. That seemed to force Cerbo to declare itself as instance 0, and when the Cerbo shows up and declares itself as instance 0, that seems to go a long way to bringing my MPPT controllers back to my dashboard (good, bad, right, or wrong - I don’t particularly care what it’s supposed to do, only what it IS doing).

That said, I chose instances 4 and 5 today, turned off the VE.Can port network, turned it back on and at least the MPPT designated instance 4 returned to my dashboard. Instance 5 didn’t seem to take, so I switched 5 back to 3, reset the VE.Can port network again, and then moments later my dashboard was back to missing any information about my PV generation.

I’m pulling this out of thin air because I don’t know how these things are supposed to work. I suspect Cerbo is supposed to be instance 0 and is happy to be that guy in the background, except maybe there’s a glitch in there somewhere? When I move things to new instance numbers and reset the network, Cerbo declares itself and the other new instances as novel and so is happy to communicate with them and everything works tickety-boo. But, on the next reset (whether manual or, perhaps, scheduled somewhere in the code?) none of these things is novel anymore, it stops declaring itself, and starts ignoring the other instances along the way. But, you know, again, I’m just making this up and probably way off - I’m just technical enough to get myself in trouble and maybe no more technical than that.

Either way, I don’t have anymore time to mess with it for awhile, so at least now the VE.Can cables are wired according to installation instructions - though that doesn’t seem to actually do me any good. At least one person who has experienced this before updated their forum thread to say that one day their MPPT information just came back like magic - so I’ll wait for that day, I guess.