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jamespitman avatar image
jamespitman asked

Water Flow Meter for Cerbo GX

Does anyone know of a water flow meter that works with the Cerbo GX? I'd like to have a meter on the water pump of my RV such that the total amount of water that has been pumped will display via the Cerbo. So if the RV water pump has pumped 10 gallons for example, one of the items on the Cerbo display will say exactly that. Does anyone know of a sensor like this that will work with the Cerbo GX units?

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jjbond avatar image jjbond commented ·
Watching, would also love to find out this information as well, thanks for posting.
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johnparvic avatar image
johnparvic answered ·

Hi

I've been looking at flow meters for a similar project. Most of them seem to be pulse output so you would need some code to count pulses and convert to litres.

You might be able to do this with Node Red running on the Cerbo and then use https://github.com/freakent/dbus-mqtt-devices to get the readings on to DBUS and therefore into the Cerbo display.

However, I'm not sure if Node Red on the GX has access to an input that could accept the pulses.

What you could do is connect the flow sensor to a raspberry pi and publish the readings on MQTT to the cerbo and still use the above dbus-mqtt-devices code to get the readings into the system.

Hope this helps

Kind regards

John

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matt1309 avatar image
matt1309 answered ·

Another (slightly more involved option) option would be make it all in one custom driver.

There's a few github sources that have the bulk of work done for you. Just need to tweak them to flow meter rather than energy meters (to include whatever data points you want and swap from wh to litres or similar).

A good example would be:

venus.dbus-shellyPlug/shellyPlug.py at main · Telekatz/venus.dbus-shellyPlug · GitHub

In combination with pulse counter class from here:

https://github.com/wilsonwaters/PulseCounter/blob/master/pulseCounter.py


Victron offers examples here but i think the above is probably a closer jumping off point:

GitHub - victronenergy/velib_python: Victron Energy Python library





@johnparVIC solution would be less intensive coding wise i'd imagine. You could use the node red raspberry pi GPIO node

Interacting with Raspberry Pi GPIO : Node-RED (nodered.org)

and then recreate the pulse counter code (there's probably an example online but if not you just translate the python above into js) and then pass the data to MQTT


I'm happy to lend a hand on either option, both sound interesting. Enabling a full GUI for them is out of my league but a basic dbus service/device I can help with.

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klim8skeptic avatar image
klim8skeptic answered ·

Pulse counting via the digital inputs is not available on either the original Cerbo GX or the Cerbo-S GX.

The new Cerbo GX MK2 can do pulse counting.

The Venus GX and the Ekrano GX can also do pulse counting via the digital inputs.

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