My understanding is Ve.can is essentially nmea2000 compatible , if so do victron publish the PGNs their products generate or consume. Surely I’m not faced with reverse engineering these.
asked
Ve.can protocol
N2K, J1939, VE.Can, RVC and other protocols are all different messages structures based on the CAN packet structure. A header defining the message ID (typically 29bit in CANv2, but some still use 11bit), who the message is for and who sent it and then 8 bytes of data. Some messages are single frame, aka 8 bytes others are multi-frame. Examples
can1 15FD076D [8] FF C4 63 72 FF 7F FF FF can1 268 [8] 0A 92 05 4B 09 D0 03 F2
A good starting point to understand CAN is probably the wikipedia site
Except for RVC all the CAN message definitions are private, even N2K you need to pay to get the specification of all the messages. A lot of people have reverse engineered the message and definitions exist in open source libraries such as Canboat, NMEA200 library and others.
Some Victron VE.Can or VREG messages are published by victron, but a large number are not. So depending on what you want to do, yes reverse engineering is the only way.
I’m an ex CAN firmware developer , but for Victron to withhold ve.can protocols is nonsense. Why make integrators life difficult.
Again is VE.CAN capable of coexisting on a nmea 2000 ?
What protocol is always documented and can someone point me to it.
Clearly people like REC must have access
I’ll bring asking ALOT of questions to Victron at METS.
Yes N2K and VE.CAN Co-exist, as can J1939 have them all running as they use different message IDs to for the data they provide.
The CAN connected batteries do not necessarily implement VERegs, but CAN BMS messages.
Maybe share what your trying to do and you might get more specific information.
Once Victron publish all VEReg messages then they have to support the community and loose flexibility in modifying the messages should they need to. The messages are private as they are used by their kit to integrate and communicate, not necessarily for third parties to integrate to their equipment. They have the Cerbo and other means of integrating with third parties.
They also provide standard N2K messages which can provide a wealth of information about battery and inverter status.
Might be easier to describe what your trying to achieve than just ask for specs.
Thanks. One of the links you provided does provide significant VE.CAN information
Yes VE.CAN is compatible with NMEA2000 but it’s mainly not certified. The version of the NMEA2000 database is given.
I do have across to the AC power PGNS and the Victron document provides some base level identification of the PGN supported
For a company to say
“
.Can / NMEA2000
Canbus is the preferred protocol for third parties to communicate with our products. Our CANbus protocol is based on the NMEA2000 and J1939 protocols.
“
And not provide comprehensive detailed protocol descriptions is rather bizarre.
All they can do is define what N2K messages they support. If you become a member of NMEA you get the specifications, but are not able to share the specs. Hence you iether need to be an NMEA member to get the specs or use some of the resources I shared that have reverse engineered N2K.
It is no different for any of the marine instrument manufactures. They define which N2K messages their equipment sends and can receive, but not the message structure or detail.
take a look at the VenusOS manual as it has a section on N2K.
Victron does not need its VREG definitions to be certified as they are private messages and use the relevant messages which N2K allows for private message definitions.
Some of the open source N2K libraries will provide details of the N2K PGNs.
Again Victron can not supply those PGN definitions. Take a look at the NMEA organisations web site and that will give you more background on why and what you must do to get the messages.
