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Renogy RS-485 communications interface...in detail

Using a simple RS-485 to USB adapter (model UT-885...uotek.com) cable pin out;

RS-485 to USB adapter Renogy DC-DC unit RS-485 (RJ-45 connector) interface
pin 1 (TX\RX +) pin 2
pin 2 (TX\RX -) pin 3
pin 5 (grnd) pin 4
 
I have the Renogy DCC50S with the BT-2 bluetooth monitor and the RMS-DCDC monitoring screen and I'm trying to get the 2 monitoring units to work with the DCDC charger.
I don't need the BT to work while I'm driving but would like to use the monitoring screen so my idea was to use a 4PDT relay to switch the screen in with ignition and have the BT unit working through the NC contacts when engine is shut off.

I'm only using contacts 1-4 as shown in the PDF as I assumed the Canbus contacts could be ignored but it doesn't work.
I notice the the RJ45 pin numbering on the image in the PDF seems to be reversed i.e. numbering from 8 to 1 from the left. Do the numbers & allocations in the list actually correspond to the numbers shown on the plug?

Thanks for any enlightenment or guidance!
 
I have the Renogy DCC50S with the BT-2 bluetooth monitor and the RMS-DCDC monitoring screen and I'm trying to get the 2 monitoring units to work with the DCDC charger.
I don't need the BT to work while I'm driving but would like to use the monitoring screen so my idea was to use a 4PDT relay to switch the screen in with ignition and have the BT unit working through the NC contacts when engine is shut off.

I'm only using contacts 1-4 as shown in the PDF as I assumed the Canbus contacts could be ignored but it doesn't work.
I notice the the RJ45 pin numbering on the image in the PDF seems to be reversed i.e. numbering from 8 to 1 from the left. Do the numbers & allocations in the list actually correspond to the numbers shown on the plug?

Thanks for any enlightenment or guidance!

Just answering my own question, I found that pins 5 to 8 work correctly. The PDF is showing non-standard RJ45 pin numbering.
So I now have the RMS-DCDC screen showing while ignition is on and the BT-2 working when I shut down.
 
Sorry to revive an ooooold thread. Wondering what cable you guys might recommend for this today? I cannot buy the Renogy official cable.
Looking at Renogy Document for the cable - https://www.renogy.com/content/RSCB1.8M24/SCB-Manual.pdf
It references using the "FT232RL" chip.
Would something like this work: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B07N1LZSBN/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A1SRKLXY0XF9L5&psc=1
Its suppose to be the same chip. Just no guess on the pin out. I am trying to wrap my brain around it.

I want the cable to do a couple things.
- I have a few of these batteries and they are on a few different firmware versions. I am hoping to update them all to the same.
- I have seen the dbus-serialbattery project ( https://louisvdw.github.io/dbus-serialbattery/ ) that I should be able to add the BMS directly to my Cerbo (Raspberry Pi).

Any advice is appreciated.
 
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Sorry to revive an ooooold thread. Wondering what cable you guys might recommend for this today? I cannot buy the Renogy official cable.
Looking at Renogy Document for the cable - https://www.renogy.com/content/RSCB1.8M24/SCB-Manual.pdf
It references using the "FT232RL" chip.
Would something like this work: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B07N1LZSBN/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A1SRKLXY0XF9L5&psc=1
Its suppose to be the same chip. Just no guess on the pin out. I am trying to wrap my brain around it.

I want the cable to do a couple things.
- I have a few of these batteries and they are on a few different firmware versions. I am hoping to update them all to the same.
- I have seen the dbus-serialbattery project ( https://louisvdw.github.io/dbus-serialbattery/ ) that I should be able to add the BMS directly to my Cerbo (Raspberry Pi).

Any advice is appreciated.
Hello,
did you manage to connect Renogy LiFePo4 to Venus Pi? I want to by 3 of these batteries but I didn't find any info about connecting more than one battery to Victron Venus.
Thanks
 
Hello,
did you manage to connect Renogy LiFePo4 to Venus Pi? I want to by 3 of these batteries but I didn't find any info about connecting more than one battery to Victron Venus.
Thanks
I paused the project for other higher priority stuff for me... In the end I can use the renogy bluetooth for what I need. Saying that I would like to get it working. It looks like though all I need is to install the dbus software and a renogy official cable for programming an updating the batteries. I could not find one to order though so I have to make my own and could not find any good info short of guessing a little.

Would love to hear what you come up with.
 
Sorry to revive an ooooold thread. Wondering what cable you guys might recommend for this today? I cannot buy the Renogy official cable.
Looking at Renogy Document for the cable - https://www.renogy.com/content/RSCB1.8M24/SCB-Manual.pdf
It references using the "FT232RL" chip.
Would something like this work: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B07N1LZSBN/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A1SRKLXY0XF9L5&psc=1
Its suppose to be the same chip. Just no guess on the pin out. I am trying to wrap my brain around it.

I want the cable to do a couple things.
- I have a few of these batteries and they are on a few different firmware versions. I am hoping to update them all to the same.
- I have seen the dbus-serialbattery project ( https://louisvdw.github.io/dbus-serialbattery/ ) that I should be able to add the BMS directly to my Cerbo (Raspberry Pi).

Any advice is appreciated.
Hey there. I'm going to give this a shot with a Cerbo and see what happens. I'm going to use a generic RS485 to USB interface since it appears the Renogy model is no longer available. I think the problem I am likely to run into is that each battery will somehow need to be assigned an individual address/drop number. It appears that this uses modbus protocol, and I would expect that each battery would be factory assigned the same address. If I want to connect to multiple batteries with the same connection (in my case 4), then I would need to figure this out. A workaround would be to put an RS485 to USB on each battery and run them to the Cerbo individually, but that seems like a messy set-up when you can daisy chain the batteries together and use a single connection.

EDIT:

Looking at your Amazon link, it appears the adapter you were looking at is RS232, not RS485. Same language, different protocol. RS232 doesn't allow for multiple devices where RS485 does. The Renogy batteries are RS485 devices.
 
Waking up an old thread again... I have a Renogy battery and was wondering if anyone had made progress? With regards to the device address,
the linked document doesn't appear to state anywhere what defaults might be, but for "PDU"s you can apparently read and change it with the register at 0x1A. I'm waiting for an RS485 interface but presumably I can then poll all device addresses to find out what address my battery has, and then scan register addresses to find undocumented ones, and if the contents of one is the same as the device address it's a good indication that it might be.
 
Waking up an old thread again... I have a Renogy battery and was wondering if anyone had made progress? With regards to the device address,
the linked document doesn't appear to state anywhere what defaults might be, but for "PDU"s you can apparently read and change it with the register at 0x1A. I'm waiting for an RS485 interface but presumably I can then poll all device addresses to find out what address my battery has, and then scan register addresses to find undocumented ones, and if the contents of one is the same as the device address it's a good indication that it might be.
Hey Matthew

I'm going to take a shot at this in the next few days with a Cerbo GX.

I've got 4 Renogy Smart Lithium batteries and hope to connect them on one connection. I've got them daisy chained together with short RJ45 cables and used the Renogy battery monitor to auto-address them with sequential addresses (1-4). It appears that the default address is always 1 until you hook the data ports together. I didn't test this extensively, but the battery monitor clearly shows 4 separate batteries and 4 separate addresses. The protocol appears to be modbus, so it is likely you could connect directly to the batteries with a modbus master program such as QModMaster (free) and readdress them in that fashion if you didn't have a battery monitor. I'm using this USB to 485 adapter (currently out of stock but other variations of the same brand available. I've used this brand of adapter with countless devices and it works great. It uses a standard off-the-shelf FTDI chip so it should be automatically recognizable to the Cerbo.
 

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Regarding the Renogy connectivity issue... I found a few things which likely caused it and how to correct it.

#1. I shortened the BT-1 cable and installed the controller inside the cabinet directly over the 60A CC.

#2 The Renogy "app" was replaced with the SRNE app (AFAIK SRNE makes the CC for Renogy) which has had no connection issues BEFORE I installed the JDY board in #3 below.

#3, I have a JDY-33-SPP bluetooth 4 channel relay controller in the same cabinet as the BT-1 and once in a while it causes the SRNE app to fail to connect. To fix this I either break the JDY connection or power off the JDY controller. But that can be a pain getting into the cabinet so since I'm only using two of the four JDY relays I'm going to try self enabling the JDY with the NC connection and use itself to break its' own input power. Theoretically it "should" solve this BT-1 issue completely.
 
Not a great outcome....

A few wins. The USB-485 adapter was recognized. Managed to get dbus serialbattery installed with no issues using puTTY.

After noticing the batteries were not showing up on the device list, I ran a few tests. I found that the driver was successfully connecting to one of my 4 batteries, returning the model number of the battery. However, it appears that any messages returned after that are invalid and not recognized. I'm questioning whether the mapping inside the driver is correct, or possibly this model of battery is mapped slightly different. I've reached out to the developer of the driver to see if we can sort it out.

More to come.
 
Firstly, apologies for not replying earlier - I expected to be notified and wasn't.

Secondly, I have made some progress. I have one of their (older? - was "refurbished") grey batteries. Its Modbus address is 48 (geddit?). I can query its parameters and even switch it off with a Modbus command. (It can be switched on again with the internal or an external pushbutton.)

I also have a Sofar HYD5000-ES inverter which, as expected, isn't compatible, so I had to tell the inverter the battery is lead-acid. I'm going to do more sophisticated things later, but just letting it do its own automatic thing, it will charge for a bit, then stop, and keep repeating this cycle. Voltage doesn't exceed the limit, and no events are recorded, so who knows what's going on?

(Edit: seems to be a known issue with these inverters so looking at emulating a Pylontech battery.)

(The Sofar manual is so bad that it doesn't explain that the inverter can do what I expected to have to do by external means: charge the battery from an existing PV/inverter setup (rather than attached panels) if there is excess power available. If I'd known that I might have gone for a battery I know is compatible.)
 
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Hey all, an interesting follow up to this.

One of the developers of the driver posted a fix for this yesterday, so I downloaded it to test first thing yesterday morning. Initially it did not work, but as I was testing it I was in contact with the developer, who ultimately ended up remoting into my system to test and debug, ultimately getting the driver working. This took him most of the afternoon, and considering I'm in Northern Alberta and he's in Italy, he worked until around midnight his time sorting this out.

The last few posts in this discussion explain where to go to download the updated driver (not an official release yet) and instructions for install.

Please donate to mr-manuel if you find this driver useful. He donated a large portion of his time toward development of this functionality.
 
Has anyone written a C++ interface to display the Battery and PV data? My initial interest is PV voltage and current, Battery voltage and charging current, and Battery temperature. I'll be using an Arduino, so I'm not running the Venus OS and I'm not sure I can dig enough out of the driver mentioned above to make any sense.

BTW, is the interface for the Victron VE Direct port available? I'd like to do the same simple data recovery there, too.
 
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Hey all, an interesting follow up to this.

One of the developers of the driver posted a fix for this yesterday, so I downloaded it to test first thing yesterday morning. Initially it did not work, but as I was testing it I was in contact with the developer, who ultimately ended up remoting into my system to test and debug, ultimately getting the driver working. This took him most of the afternoon, and considering I'm in Northern Alberta and he's in Italy, he worked until around midnight his time sorting this out.

The last few posts in this discussion explain where to go to download the updated driver (not an official release yet) and instructions for install.

Please donate to mr-manuel if you find this driver useful. He donated a large portion of his time toward development of this functionality.

Can you share some details on how you got the Renogy batteries to work with the Cerbo system? What are you using to connect the batteries to the Cerbo? I've tried with the below devices and cannot get it to recognize the battery/batteries. I've got v1.4.20240706modbus installed.

Amazon.com: Suamdoen USB to RJ45 RS485 Serial Programming Cable for Delta IFD6500 Communication RS485 Adapter Converter Cable Support Win10 : Electronics

Amazon.com : EPEVER USB to RS485 PC Communication Cable 1.5M for MPPT Solar Charge Controller with RJ45 Connector (CC-USB-RS485-150U) : Patio, Lawn & Garden

Amazon.com: CERRXIAN 1FT RS485 to USB Terminal Converter Serial Port Cable for Windows 7 8 10 : Electronics
this is how I pinned the connection to the USB side and did not connect the ground wire.


1723573981359.jpeg
 

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