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Howdy,
in our camper, I need to monitor 2 separate battery banks.
One bank (AGM 450ah ish) is the regular house bank.
The other one, a 270 Ah LiFoPo4 is for critical devices .. and only for those devices. ( My wife is on a food pump, So the fridge for meds, liquid food and charging the pump has to be safe).
I certainly can just install 2 systems ( shunt, cerbo and display ), but my dream would be a single display
Any hints are highly welcome
Thanks
Oskar
As @pwfarnell says, you can have more than one SmartShunt but only one is assigned as the main system one. Below are some images of what you get on the current gui, the new beta gui and also the web VRM:
Home page on main GUI:
Devices list on main GUI:
Brief page on new beta GUI:
Overview page on new beta GUI:
Battery page on new beta GUI:
Main dashboard on internet VRM:
It is possible to connect more than one battery bank via a Smartshunt or BMV to the Cerbo GX or a lithium battery with BMS communication. However, only one battery monitor can be assigned to be the "system" battery. Usually the house battery would be assigned to be the system battery. This battery would be the one on the front page of the Cerbo GX and on the dashboard flow chart on VRM.
The other battery (critical battery in your case) would only be visible by navigating into the devices menu to see its status and it will be shown in its own separate box on the VRM dashboard.
thanks a lot - that, especially the new GUI seems workable
Just to note that the new gui is currently only available via a web browser on your local network or via the VRM console. I'm assuming it will replace the existing display screen on the Cerbo GX itself eventually but that is an assumption.
All interesting stuff, much of which I will be looking into...
I have a none standard, unsupported, setup which works well. The details are not important in this context apart from the fact that I have two GX devices and wanted a single dashboard.
NodeRed was my choice to display the status and control the interaction of the two systems.
I run NodeRed on a CerboGX and reach out to a CCGX, on the other system, using Modbus, the solution is stable and effective. MQTT was mentioned in a similar context and looks like it may be easier to implement, or at least more human readable when configuring, honestly I don't know.
Obviously there are several ways a task like this could be approached and I am not saying what I am doing is the right approach, if such a thing exists.
I went the way I did because it was the fewest steps and setup, I am comfortable with Modbus and found the list of registers.
Having everything in one place on a locally hosted dashboard make sense to me and it isn't hard to achieve with NodeRed...
I am not recommending anything here, just offering another potential avenue you may want to explore, as my experience has been good for the most part.
NodeRed is still evolving with new GUI options being actively developed as far as I can see.
I am about to try Dashboard 2 on the Cerbo but cant comment on that at this point.
Please don't misconstrue that as a recommendation to try Dashboard 2 on a Cerbo, it isn't.
It felt looked promising and I couldn't find anything suggesting I shouldn't try using it so I am going too, that's it.
after a lot of thinking back and forth, I decided to go with an dedicated "display/monitor"
I have a bunch of SBCs .. but I still a bit questioning myself about the approach to take.
For better understanding, a bit background.
I am Germerican model year '54, living on Colorado. German education in electronics. Self-tought software development. Started with a C64 .. CPM, Clipper the later C# - on Windows. But also a bit familiar with microcontrollers like an HCS08.
That said, the choice so is to use Android (12)
Now I need to choose between Modbus and MQTT
For modbus and Android the only (free) library I could find and looks suitable is J2mod - docu is not quite easy to find/understand
For MQTT, I was not able yet to get the Eclipse community version to work, however hive-mqtt looks OK and the client is free as well
Thoughts ?
Thanks
Oskar
