I replaced the majority of the electrical system on Kaos in May of 2022 because the old one did not meet my needs and had broken or worn out parts that I didn't want to try to replace. You can read about the whole project below.
Love reading your updates. Wish I had time to run some of the calculations. How do you get the per battery stats displayed? Do you have a Victron sense on each? I have a simpler system and would like to see that data.
Hi Jim,
The per battery stats come from the batteries themselves. I have the Victron 24 volt, 200 amp hour models with a built in Bluetooth radio. That’s how the data is showing up - a firmware upgrade a few months ago (battery firmware upgrades always make me a little nervous!) enabled the data to be displayed on the Victron Connect app main screen.
If you have Victron batteries with Bluetooth radios, you might be able to upgrade the firmware to see it.
I have Uline batteries. I was hoping if I had the sense from Victron that I could get some per battery data but I assume I would need one on each battery which seems silly.
Yeah unfortunately this is a Bluetooth radio built in to each battery and connected in a way where the data is available to the Victron app itself, and not portable to other battery types or manufacturers.
Thank you for the update. Your thorough write-ups are always appreciated.
I would like to be able to monitor the DC-DC chargers better than using a smart phone and Bluetooth.
FWIW, the bluetooth protocol that’s used for the live information on Victron app home screen has been reverse engineered (and subsequently somewhat publicly documented).
You can collect this data into SignalK and InfluxDB. I hacked up a simple signalk plugin to do this for my setup.
This is awesome! I’m going to be testing this tonight. Thank you!
Darn, I don’t think I can use this. Trying to install it on a Victron Cerbo which is right near my Orion DC-DC chargers, but it fails. Looks like it doesn’t have the python venv module and can’t install it. In fact, they don’t even have pip installed as part of their python implementation and I assume it has to do with keeping the distribution as lean as possible.
My main Signal K server is a long ways away from the DC-DC chargers so Bluetooth doesn’t work from there.
Of course this could be rewritten in pure TS/JS by anyone who is comfortable in that landscape. Assuming the Cerbo gives some access to the Bluetooth stack…
I just went with Python because that’s what I was reverse engineering in, and someone else beat me to making a decent library in Python.
