dbus-serialbattery

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

The driver will communicate with a Battery Management System (BMS) that support serial (RS232, RS485 or TTL UART) and Bluetooth communication (see BMS feature comparison for details). The data is then published to the Venus OS system (dbus). 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/charger.

History

The first version of this driver was released by Louisvdw in September 2020.

In February 2023 I (mr-manuel) made my first PR, since Louis did not have time anymore to contribute to this project.

With the release of v1.0.0 I became the main developer of this project. From then on, I have been maintaining the project and developing it further. I'm also solving 99% of the issues on GitHub.

A big thanks to Louisvdw for the initiation of this project.

Support this project

This project takes a lot of time and effort to maintain, answering support requests, adding new features and so on. If you are using this driver and you are happy with it, please make a donation to support me and this project.

Documentation

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.

Make sure the GitHub Actions run fine in your repository. In order to make the GitHub Actions run please select in your repository settings under Actions -> General -> Actions permissions the option Allow all actions and reusable workflows. Check also in your repository settings under Actions -> General -> Workflow permissions if Read and write permissions are selected. This will check your code for Flake8 and Black Lint errors. Here is a short instruction on how to set up Flake8 and Black Lint checks in VS Code. This will save you a lot of time.

See this checklist, if you want to add a new BMS

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)