question

rmaddy avatar image
rmaddy asked

Can I be notified if I left my inverter on after 11:00pm?

I'm living in a camper full time. I have no need to run my inverter at night. I usually remember to turn it off if needed but sometimes I forget. I'd like to maximize my battery, especially this time of year with low solar yield in the northern hemisphere.

I have a MultiPlus connected to a Raspberry Pi running VenusOS.

Is there any way to set some sort of alarm/reminder to go off at a preset time (say 11:00pm) if the inverter is not set to Off? And by Off, I mean in the VenusOS UI, not the physical switch on the MultiPlus.

I'm not afraid to make customizations if that's what it takes. I just need to be pointed in the right direction.

Venus OSmultiple invertersalarm
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3 Answers
Kevin Windrem avatar image
Kevin Windrem answered ·

You could use cron to run a script that sends a dbus command to turn off the inverter.

The following commands can be put in a shell script and executed from cron.

inverterService=$(dbus -y com.victronenergy.system /VebusService GetValue | sed s/\'//g)
dbus -y $inverterService /Mode SetValue 4


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rmaddy avatar image rmaddy commented ·

Shortly after posting my question I considered adding a cron job that would check if the inverter was running. I just didn't know the command to do the check and turn off the inverter. I'll play around with this. Thank you very much.

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rmaddy avatar image rmaddy commented ·

I set this up with a cron job a few days ago and I didn't think it worked because the inverter didn't shut off at the time I set. I know the code you gave me worked because when I ran my script manually the inverter turned off. So I assumed I messed up the cron entry. But oddly, the next day when I tried to ssh into my RPi I am unable to connect. Attempts to ping fail as well. Really odd that I would have network issues the day after setting up the cron job to turn off the inverter. I can't see how they could be related. But at least I have figured out that my cron job is working but it runs based on UTC time, not my local time. That's easy to resolve if I can figure out why I can't connect any more even though my RPi is connected to my WiFi as usual.


Anyway, thanks for the help.

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jkmann avatar image
jkmann answered ·

You can certainly set up an alarm using software ... but not to be flippant ... the traditional method for reminding an operator that a system is on is an indicator light. An indicator light powered by the 120V line would be a very simple way to remind yourself. You can find an indicator light that draws about 4 to 8 mA, so it won't appreciably draw down your battery, but it would be clearly visible when you turn off your other lights.

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rmaddy avatar image rmaddy commented ·

Thanks for the idea but adding a physical light is vastly more complicated (at least for me and my setup) than tweaking some software. Besides, I already have a very bright light I can use - the screen to my Raspberry Pi.

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david-ross avatar image
david-ross answered ·

Node Red in the Venus OS Large package is a perfect solution for things like this.

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Related Resources

Victron Venus OS Open Source intro page

Venus OS GitHub (please do not post to this)

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