Hello Victron Community,
Good news today!
We are officially releasing synchronised charging for SmartSolar MPPTs over a VE.Smart Network (bluetooth between the units).
It is now available with version 5.22 of VictronConnect (MPPT firmware update included).
You can find out more about it in this blog post here.
and some more technical details in the updated manual here
I thought though that given the milestone, it would be nice to give a bit of background on what goes into a feature like this, AND how this Victron Community site has actively contributed.
The Victron Community has always been extremely engaged. Given the flat structure of the company, it is possible for the right person, or team to quickly get involved and play a part in bringing something like this to life.
Active contributors who wanted these features for their installations, and participated in the discussions about these features were invited to participate in some smaller group discussions to explore exactly how it should work. R&D developers then took that feedback, and worked on writing the code. As alpha and beta testing versions became available, that small group of active contributors, again provided information and feedback.
This helped speed and improve the quality of the testing, as it expanded Victron's qualified testing environments.
Once happy with the stability, a more open version was made available, via Victron Professional and VRM. This has been going on now for several months, and based on that experience we are now able to bundle the new firmware and features into VictronConnect, available to all.
Thank you all who have contributed and provided the positive and constructive feedback that has got us to this point.
Victron is ALWAYS learning how we can improve our products, and the processes that we use to research and develop them.
