Being able to monitor the solar setups is required of course and one of the things that was ticking me off was not being able to use bluetooth except while standing beside the equipment basically.
I needed to monitor it from my computer room which is over 100 feet away easily and also when not at home.
I have solar assistant which is very handy and home assistant but I had no access to the cool bms's built into the batteries and no access to the victron smart shunt's nice app except via bluetooth which has no range to speak of.
I was planning on doing some kind of pi setup but the more I got into doing this the more complicated it was getting and down right annoying. Well I have a bunch of old smart phones laying around from years of upgrades so it seemed kind of stupid buying hardware just to do this when I had the phones laying around.
The solution? Download droidVNC-NG from the app store. It's opensource and free.
Run that on the phone and setup a password and then use vnc viewer on a desktop pc or use a vnc viewer on a tablet or another phone to control it from there.
All of those wonderful bluetooth solar equipment apps are now available from anywhere. I need to come up with an internet visible solution for people to use since I'm using a tunnel that is unique to my equipment and won't help anyone else. But this is only needed if your not on the same network. Basically all of this works fine while at home but not when your at work or something.
Screen shots from my desktop :
I hope this helps anyone wanting to use BT stuff without the range hassles.
I needed to monitor it from my computer room which is over 100 feet away easily and also when not at home.
I have solar assistant which is very handy and home assistant but I had no access to the cool bms's built into the batteries and no access to the victron smart shunt's nice app except via bluetooth which has no range to speak of.
I was planning on doing some kind of pi setup but the more I got into doing this the more complicated it was getting and down right annoying. Well I have a bunch of old smart phones laying around from years of upgrades so it seemed kind of stupid buying hardware just to do this when I had the phones laying around.
The solution? Download droidVNC-NG from the app store. It's opensource and free.
Run that on the phone and setup a password and then use vnc viewer on a desktop pc or use a vnc viewer on a tablet or another phone to control it from there.
All of those wonderful bluetooth solar equipment apps are now available from anywhere. I need to come up with an internet visible solution for people to use since I'm using a tunnel that is unique to my equipment and won't help anyone else. But this is only needed if your not on the same network. Basically all of this works fine while at home but not when your at work or something.
Screen shots from my desktop :
I hope this helps anyone wanting to use BT stuff without the range hassles.
