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Michael Gane avatar image
Michael Gane asked

Epever MPPT on DBUS not displayed on GUI

I Have a Tracer 40A MPPT that uses Modbus protocol and am running Venus on a raspberry pi.

I've managed to run a dbus service as com.victronenergy.solarcharger.epever_ttyUSB2 and then in a separate script can publish values to it by writing on the system bus.

I can set the /State and the Pv / battery info fine and it displays in the "Device List" in the Venus remote console panel and the values update just fine.


I never get a solar item in the overview screen and it doesn't display on the VRM portal. Is there some values that I need to publish somewhere else other than the `com.victronenergy.solarcharger.epever_ttyUSB2` dbus item to get the solar input to display?

VRMVenus OSCCGX Color Controlmppt charging
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apharcha avatar image apharcha commented ·
I have EPEVER sending data to their App/Portal however, I would like to integrate EPEVER data to the Shunt/Battery usage on Victory to tie into the system, if that were to be possible.


Would you be able to share the script and process for getting the data out of EPEVER ?
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Kevin Windrem avatar image
Kevin Windrem answered ·

You may need to create and populate additional parameters in order to get the system to recognize your dBus service as a valid solar controller. If you have other solar charge controllers, you can look at it in dbus-spy to see what else you might need to create.

For starters, the /Mgmt/... parameters and /Connected and possibly /DeviceInstance.

There is some information about dBus services here:

https://github.com/victronenergy/venus/wiki/dbus-api

and more here:

https://github.com/victronenergy/venus/wiki/dbus

note the section on generic paths which may be required to make a dBus service recognizable.

also some specifics for solar charge controllers here:

https://github.com/victronenergy/venus/wiki/dbus#solar-chargers

Hope that helps

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Michael Gane avatar image Michael Gane commented ·

I have most of the information now showing in the venus remote console.

One thing I can't seem to figure out, is what I should be setting for the following values? 

/ProductId
/DeviceInstance


I assume the productId will affect if the overview screen displays the data as solar input?

I can't seem to find any examples anywhere of productIds and the various GitHub dbus pages only let me know it should probably be a hex value?

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Kevin Windrem avatar image
Kevin Windrem answered ·

/ProductId can be any number you'd like. I just used 0

/DeviceInstance can be any number as long as it is unique across all services with the same service name. There's a brief discussion here:

https://github.com/victronenergy/venus/wiki/dbus-api.

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Michael Gane avatar image Michael Gane commented ·

Thanks!

Turns out I wasn't passing some of the values correctly to dbus which was causing the system to crash or not register correctly.


dbus --system com.victronenergy.solarcharger.sample /State SetValue %3

// Note the % after SetValue, /State wasn't working without this


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Nikolay Nedeltchev avatar image
Nikolay Nedeltchev answered ·

Hello, @michael-gane.

What you did sounds great! Can you please share? I use the same MPPT controller. Thank you in advance.

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Michael Gane avatar image Michael Gane commented ·

Hey, the scripts I use to publish on DBUS are here: https://github.com/ganey/victron-json-mppt

After many weeks of trying, I couldn't poll the Epever for readings frequently enough to keep it stable in Venus, it kept dropping out from the GUI and then the epever would freeze for a few minutes and not provide any readings.

I currently have a raspberry pi reading once a minute from the Epever and writing the values to a json file.

The github scripts read the json file over my local network and publish the values on DBUS.


You could probably read the values once a minute from a raspberry pi running Venus and just publish them frequently on dbus. I tried this but my epever still wasn't happy doing the readings, it might be because it uses the +ve as the common rather than the -ve, newer models (with blue buttons?) use -ve as common instead.

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Nikolay Nedeltchev avatar image Nikolay Nedeltchev Michael Gane commented ·

Thank you for your reply.

I red someware info that this MPPT controller is very sensitive on 'grounding' and this can cause the problems of interupting the data.

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kantarus avatar image kantarus Michael Gane commented ·

Can you write a step by step procedure for your script?

i dont get it to work with the files.


Many thanks

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apharcha avatar image
apharcha answered ·

Hello All, @Michael Gane

I have a EPEVER Tracer 100 MPPT that I'm trying to see on my Raspberry PI running Victron Victory OS v2.92. I have a Victron 500A Shunt that is connected to the battery to see usage from Inverter.

Is there any way or driver for me to connect my EPever MPPT say using some modbus-tcp setup or any driver or script that I can use to see EPEVER on the RPI?

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Michael Gane avatar image
Michael Gane answered ·

Sorry for the late reply,

I'll try and find the epever script i used to read the details from it, but the epever is quite slow at returning results (not fast enough for dbus on CCGX to work properly) and has issues with grounding when connected to the ccgx (produces gibberish when reading the data)

I ended up using 2 raspberry pi's, an old one that reads from the epever and writes the values to a json file (i'll find the script for this later this week when i'm home)


I then used this on a rpi running VenusOS: https://github.com/ganey/victron-json-mppt to read the remote json file and publish the values on dbus. This could be adapted to read data from any remote location.

I don't have an epever for testing any more (i got some victron MPPTS cheap) unfortunately so i can only share the scripts i used to use.

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apharcha avatar image apharcha commented ·
Thanks for the reply - just saw this... If you get the script, I would love to give it a shot.
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Related Resources

Victron Venus OS Open Source intro page

Venus OS GitHub (please do not post to this)

Additional resources still need to be added for this topic

CCGX Product Manual

CCGX Product page