v3.70~74 - nice idea having a possibilitiy to update pylontech batteries. At my system I found one entry for pylontech batteries but there are 8 modules installed (6x US3000C, 2x US5000). I don’t know if any of these should be updatable via venus os?
Out of curiosity… Which battery has that serial number? The master?
Pylontech do not support end user updates without direct communication with their support.
I have seen users do it and in some cases it can voided their warranty.
It is never a good idea to mess with third party products.
@OJack, try pressing the “upload” icon, which is the little cloud with an arrow pointing into it.
And make sure that when to update, using what files, is done in cooperation with Pylontech support.
This feature has been developed in conjunction with Pylontech, to facilitate (remote)support and diagnostics.
And from Victron side we facilitate it with the platform, but are not involved in the support as such on a system level.
Yes it’s the masters serial.
Don’t worry, I don’t actually want to do an update on my own, especially since there’s no reason to. My system is running very stably. I’m just interested in the new features themselves.
Okay, I would then recommend clearly indicating this in a pop-up window with two confirmation steps (checking a box and clicking OK). Something like, “I understand that updates are only permitted with the consent of Pylontech support and Victron accepts no liability.”
Because there are many users these days who update everything they can (or think they can) without any reason.
@mpvader
Will this work through the hub?
All commands go through a (the) master battery.
Even if you have multiple groups, there is always only a “master” master. :-))
The hub is just exposing a CAN interface to the inverter and then “export” the commands/communication to the other stacks’ masters.
When it’s used, the hub is the master seen by the inverter.
According with the victron driver (and pylontech protocol) used for pylontech flashing, it first interrogates this master to see its serial and firmware version and then the firmware binary file is validated and sent in small blocks to the same master.
Pylontech say that the “master” master will take care of the firmware file to be (re)distributed to the others.
Appreciate how much you dig into the inner working of things @alexpescaru . Then a mix of battery models may be an interesting one for updates.
From what I see Victron has tackled until now with Pylontech and ZYC batteries for updating firmware…
The update firmware over CAN is true only for the protocol version(s) implemented after mid 2021, because there is the need for certain commands implemented only after this year.
I have a mix of US5000 and US2000 batteries and, for example, one of my US2000 batteries is manufactured exactly on 2021 (I’ve bought it SH from a guy) and it responds to these “new” commands with the default flashed firmware from factory.
I have a mix of 2xUS5000 and 6xUS3000C but if there is a real chance of damaging them I’m not sure if I want to be the guinea pig 
If they work reliable, don’t mess with the firmware.
Anyway, even if you brick them, there is a nice and safe procedure to recover them.
But I see that you have a small “itch” for updating considering you are testing Venus beta versions… 
Yes, on the one hand I like to help a little bit developing such interesting things, and on the other hand it’s due to my engineers playful nature.
Hi all,
I’m really excited to see the new Pylontech remote firmware update feature showing up in the Venus OS v3.70–74 beta.
For context: we’ve had to manually upgrade a lot of clients’ older Pylontech batteries over the years, not “just for the sake of updating,” but because it was necessary to make systems stable and compatible. So having a supported remote update workflow could be a huge improvement for maintaining many sites.
A few real-world cases where firmware updates were essential for us:
US2000(B) / US3000(B) older firmware: Updating was a game changer because the older FW wasn’t reporting individual cell voltages. Now that many early installs are reaching 5+ years, this visibility has been key for remotely identifying weak modules and narrowing down failing batteries inside a pack.
RT12100: Updating FW was necessary when adding more batteries in parallel, because some combinations of old and new FW wouldn’t work together at all.
Mixed setups like US2000(B) + UP5000: We’ve seen cases where these didn’t work reliably together (even with the UP5000 as master) until the US2000 units were updated.
One more thing I noticed: after running firmware discovery in VRM, the firmware version shown for the master battery does not necessarily match the actual firmware installed on the battery (as verified locally). Maybe this is something the Victron team still needs to look into.
Has anybody tried the remote update yet?
I’ve installed the OS beta on a couple of setups and I can see the battery displayed in the list of updatable devices, but I haven’t flashed anything yet. We already updated most of our critical older-client sites by visiting them one by one, so I’m mainly curious how reliable this is in real-world conditions.
Also, does this work across all models? These are the models we have in the field:
US2000(B), US2000C, US3000(B), US3000C, US5000, UP5000, UF5000, RT12100, UP2500.
If you’ve successfully updated any of these via the new feature, could you please share:
Thanks in advance!
I wanted to test it yesterday but the VRM seems to need a special FW file for that.
It doesn’t accept the .zip or .bin file that I could find, it only wants a .xup or .dup file.
Here is example of wrong version showing
RT12100 battery - manually updated from v2.6 to v2.8
shows correctly in Device list
doesn’t show serial at all and wrong FW version in the remote update query results
Thanks for your reply - Just now, I have sent email to Pylontech service for LATAM region asking if they can provide me firmware in compatible format for US2000(B) model to kick things off. Will let you know if they respond.
Hi @peter
Firmware is sent to the pack’s master. From that moment it’s Pylontech’s master firmware business to disseminate it to its slaves.
It highly depends on their current firmware to accept “remote” master/slave update.
Also, the command for getting the firmware’s version it’s highly dependable on the current firmware.
Before getting the firmware version, the Victron’s Pylontech updater driver is defaulting the version to “v1.0”.
So, if you know that the version is 2.8, it means that your current master battery doesn’t support “get firmware version” command used during firmware update process (there are two CAN IDs for reporting firmware version).
Good chance that it doesn’t support remote update also… But I may be wrong.
Hi @M_Lange
From what I’ve seen, the pylon firmware updater driver accepts any type of file type extension.
The restriction for xup or dup files may be a something that it’s characteristic to VRM.
Try to rename the binary file from pylontech and give it the xup or dup extension, in order for the file to reach Cerbo and update utility.
