question

mvader (Victron Energy) avatar image
mvader (Victron Energy) asked

mqtt broker address will change soon

Hi all,

To address a soon coming broker (over-)load issue, we are changing our single instance of the Mosquitto broker on mqtt.victronenergy.com to a cluster of Mosquitto brokers.

The first step is that we've made a series of new dns records (mqtt123.victronenergy.com). And in Venus OS v2.40 we've added a change that it connects to one of those addresses.

For now, they all still point to the same single Mosquitto instance as before, so technically nothing has changed.

But, in the coming weeks, we'll be deploying the new cluster. And from that moment onwards, any customer code that connects to mqtt.victronenergy.com will need to have to be adapted to the new scheme. See the changes in the dbus-mqtt readme for what has changed and what you need to do in case you are using this in your software projects.


In the interim, customers can keep using the previous Venus OS version, v2.33 is the latest one. It will keep using mqtt.victronenergy.com, and we'll keep that up and running for a long time to come.


More technical background about this change can be found in the related Venus OS issue:

https://github.com/victronenergy/venus/issues/543

MQTT
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3 Answers
mvader (Victron Energy) avatar image
mvader (Victron Energy) answered ·

And note that due to thials change you can’t (in a simple manner) speak to or listen to multiple devices at the same time

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mvader (Victron Energy) avatar image
mvader (Victron Energy) answered ·

On february 16th, we deployed the new cluster: all mqttxyz.victronnnenergy.com now no longer all point to the same single Mosquitto instance.

In case this broke your system, the quick fix is to revert to v2.33 (as mentioned above), since that will still use our old broker at mqtt.victronenergy.com as its broker, rather than the new cluster. That way your clients can also find your system by connecting to mqtt.victronenergy.com.

But thats only temporary, anyone using MQTT and our brokers to connect to Victron systems will need to change their application. See above link to the dbus-mqtt readme for the technical details.

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sanderson answered ·

A related question for you @mvader (Victron Energy Staff). I have a few systems that I regularly communicate with via MQTT. With this change I need to find the right topic to read back the firmware version that Victron is running. The reason I need to find this is that we need to be robust against events where the FW is reverted to a a pre-v2.40 release. One of our victrons reverted and resulted in us not being able to communicate with it until we switched the broker back to the old one. In other words, being able to read back the FW from MQTT is imperative for efficient and robust communication with the inverter.


I read through: https://github.com/victronenergy/venus/wiki/dbus#system

I tested system/0/FirmwareVersion, vebus/257/FirmwareVersion, and a few other less promising topics to see if I could read back the version (e.g. v2.42) with no luck.


Thank you.

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mvader (Victron Energy) avatar image mvader (Victron Energy) ♦♦ commented ·

Hi @sanderson, the firmware version is indeed currently not available on dbus. I'll look into adding it. Thank you.

An alternative could be to use the VRM API to find out: VRM knows firmware version.

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sanderson avatar image sanderson mvader (Victron Energy) ♦♦ commented ·

Got it thanks. That works.

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Related Resources

Victron MQTT readme