I have a Raspi Pi 4, running Venus, with a Fogstar Drift Pro battery. I’m trying to pull the battery into Venus, but failing. I’ve tried BT, but that fails.
Has anyone had success in this, or am I wasting my time?
I have a Raspi Pi 4, running Venus, with a Fogstar Drift Pro battery. I’m trying to pull the battery into Venus, but failing. I’ve tried BT, but that fails.
Has anyone had success in this, or am I wasting my time?
Venus only supports batteries over CAN, so on a Pi you’d need an adapter for that.
There are 3rd party integrations for serial connectivity.
Once connected, only supported batteries will be recognised.
https://www.victronenergy.com/live/battery_compatibility:start
In the absence of the above, adding a shunt is the alternative.
If you are a keen developer, there are ways and means to customise the behaviour.
You can try search the old forum as well, where there are some older posts on similar topics.
Appreciate the reply, I shall investigate further from the links you gave.
It’s annoying because the Fogstar batteries integrate into the GX hardware, the battery list / link you gave doesn’t show Fogstar.
I do have a shunt, but it’s not giving me the info in the GUI, do I need to get another Victron cable to plug into the shunt and Pi USB?
Lots of manufacturers have integrated but dont have official support (as it has not been internally tested by Victron).
What that means is all integration questions should be directed to the battery manufacturer who is making the claims.
Yes you need to connect the shunt to the pi with a ve direct to usb cable.
Yeah, I contacted Fogstar and got this reply -
"We have very little experience with this sort of application, I’m afraid. As far as I know the Pro was designed for integration with the Cerbo GX from Victron but beyond that, I’m not sure.
The Cerbo GX is hardwired in via the CAN port if that info is of any use to you. "
Your best chance of a reliable integration is with a Cerbo, then, not a Pi.
Yeah, no.
I’m not paying 400 for that with a screen. I appreciate, there’s integration, but I can live without it for that price.
I believe that you need a USB CAN HAT to provide BMS CAN functionality to the rasp pi. Again, search the old forum for info.
Cerbo s and no screen works too (way cheaper) Or the can hat.
The cable used will be a type a or b (but its the same pins if you skip ground)
Do you know what BMS they use in their batteries. If be very surprised if this driver doesn’t work with it:
I connect to a JK-BMS over Bluetooth to Venus running on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W with this. Works really well.
Edit: Just checked their site, they’re using JBD BMS. This is definitely supported via that driver with a USB to RS-485 cable.
I found that repo yesterday, and gave it a try. I failed, I just couldn’t get it to install. I gave up.
Then today you post, so I gave it another try, and it worked. I now have my battery listed in the GUI, via Bluetooth.
Happiness
Did you create a config file with all the battery parameters or did you just leave it on the defaults?
Yeah, I created the config file. I think you would had to too to add the Bluetooth settings.
The only thing I’ve changed in the max charge/discharge current and the Bluetooth settings.
Yeah, just done all that.
Sadly, the MPPT went a bit ‘funny’ said there wasn’t a BMS. So charging stopped.
Had to set defaults and set them back up again.
Pissing down with rain now.
Actually, that happened to me a few times too. I set up an alarm on the MPPT for it in VRM
I just rebooted the RPi and it worked again. Seems like it’s been better lately though, haven’t had to do it in months.
I suspect it’s the Bluetooth, using RS485 on another install with that driver and it’s never lost connection. Maybe using a Bluetooth USB dongle instead of the RPi onboard Bluetooth would be better.