dbus-serialbattery

This is a driver for VenusOS devices (any GX device sold by Victron or a Raspberry Pi running the VenusOS image).

The driver will communicate with a Battery Management System (BMS) that support serial communication (RS232, RS485 or TTL UART) and publish this data to the VenusOS system. The main purpose is to act as a Battery Monitor in your GX and supply State Of Charge (SOC) and other values to the inverter.

• BMS Types supported
• FAQ
• Features
• How to install
• Troubleshoot

Supporting this project:

If you find this driver helpful please considder supporting this project. You can buy me a Ko-Fi or get in contact if you would like to donate hardware.

or using Paypal.me

Developer Remarks

To develop this project, install the requirements. This project makes use of velib_python which is pre-installed on Venus-OS Devices under /opt/victronenergy/dbus-systemcalc-py/ext/velib_python. To use the python files locally, git clone the velib_python project to velib_python and add velib_python to the PYTHONPATH environment variable.

How it works

• Each supported BMS needs to implement the abstract base class Battery from battery.py.
• dbus-serialbattery.py tries to figure out the correct connected BMS by looping through all known implementations of Battery and executing its test_connection(). If this returns true, dbus-serialbattery.py sticks with this battery and then periodically executes dbushelpert.publish_battery(). publish_battery() executes Battery.refresh_data() which updates the fields of Battery. It then publishes those fields to dbus using dbushelper.publish_dbus()
• The Victron Device will be "controlled" by the values published on /Info/ - namely:
  • /Info/MaxChargeCurrent
  • /Info/MaxDischargeCurrent
  • /Info/MaxChargeVoltage
  • /Info/BatteryLowVoltage
  • /Info/ChargeRequest (not implemented in dbus-serialbattery)

For more details on the victron dbus interface see the official victron dbus documentation