Victron VenusOS driver for serial connected BMS - JBD / Daly / ANT / JKBMS / Heltec / Renogy / Tian / ECS

[Louisvdw]

is it possible to utilize this driver with either the RS485 or RS232

Yes, you can use either TTL (sometimes also called UART), RS232 or RS485 serial connection with the driver. But your BMS need to have those chips and connections and your BMS only have the TTL used by the bluetooth that is the default. You can asked for the RS485 or RS232 to be added when you order the BMS, and then you can use the bluetooth along with those other ports.

 

[aries]

Yes, you can use either TTL (sometimes also called UART), RS232 or RS485 serial connection with the driver. But your BMS need to have those chips and connections and your BMS only have the TTL used by the bluetooth that is the default. You can asked for the RS485 or RS232 to be added when you order the BMS, and then you can use the bluetooth along with those other ports.

Great info, thanks! I already have the BMS, so not too concerned if I can’t use Bluetooth at the same time.

 

[S6HU84]

@Louisvdw Do you need some more donations to make the multi battery feature happen? Is there something else we can do to help bring that to reality? Thanks for the great work, as always!

 

[Blizzard]

@Louisvdw Do you need some more donations to make the multi battery feature happen? Is there something else we can do to help bring that to reality? Thanks for the great work, as always!

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[Blizzard]

Finally got the time to connect the daly 16S 250A to my 305 Basen batteries wih your script
As suggested I removed the 10A balancer, to avoid conflicts.
The Daly/Cerbo works fine with the supplied Daly UART cable, so no need for a (expensive) Victron cable or converter
Now I have another set batteries on the way, together with a simular Daly smartBMS. (was ment for a client, but he decided to go AC instead)
What would be best:
2 banks with own BMS
2 banks with 1 BMS.
The theoretic draw can be up to 580A, would it be wiser to use both BMSes or just 1?
And another question, the smartshunt, shall I disable this? The readout is quite different (the 100% was always low on that, even if I set the high voltage to 58v) Found the answer: https://github.com/Louisvdw/dbus-serialbattery/discussions/110
Thanks Louis for the hard work, just donated also.

 

[Louisvdw]

What would be best:
2 banks with own BMS
2 banks with 1 BMS.
The theoretic draw can be up to 580A, would it be wiser to use both BMSes or just 1?

I'm still busy with the muti bank support. So until that is complete you will only see 1 BMS in VRM, but if you are using VenusOS v2.74 or lower you should still see details for both BMS in the remote console.
If all your cells are well balanced, then you can use 1 BMS with no problem if your current draw from the inverter will be handled by the 1 BMS. (5kVA Multi will draw should be below 150A at 8000W). More BMS is also a good option if it is fine that you will only see half your values for now.

PS. If your SmartShunt and BMS is so different then there is most likely a setting mismatch between them. The Daly could also need a calibration if you see some of the cells are fully charged by the BMS SOC it not near 100%. If you do see 100% SOC on the Daly it might rather be a capacity setting on the Shuntshunt you need to check

 

[Blizzard]

Thanks for that, you are right...
I forgot the daly to set the specs of the batterybank. I did that now using the BT and app. The daly and smartshunt are somewhat the same now.
I let the firmware at 2.74 on the cerbo, since there is no major upgrade in the latest.

Is it possible to display the particular cells in the cerbo? I assume this data is spitted out because the BT app can show them also. (Sorry if this is asked before)

The second bank is on the way and i got the daly smart for $150, I see they are now around $250 on aly

 

[Louisvdw]

For now VenusOS V2.74 is a good version for the driver compatibility.
We do have all the cells, but it is not displayed as VenusOS doen not have place to display them. You can look at this PR, but I still need to clean that up so that it is easy to implement/support for users so there will be some changes on how that work in future. You can test it on this beta release (see PR for details on how to install and see it). Once it is released I should have better instructions available as well.

 

[Blizzard]

I don't need to see them all, maybe the highest, lowest and middle voltage.
But thanks a lot for all the work

 

[Louisvdw]

I don't need to see them all, maybe the highest, lowest and middle voltage.
But thanks a lot for all the work

High and low cell voltages are there. You don't need to do anything to get those.
In VRM -> Advance you can also enable the Min/Max cell voltage graph and the Battery Midpoint Voltage graph. They are also both populated.

 

[Blizzard]

I was not clear: the highest and lowest cells...

 

[Louisvdw]

highest and lowest cells

Just look in Remote Console under the battery details. Low and High cell details are there.

 

[calciumkid]

Hi @Louisvdw

I've just added a comment to a bug report on your GitHub. I have a JBD BMS and a SmartSolar 100/30 MPPT. For some reason your serial driver seems to make it near impossible to have both devices recognised at once.

If I reboot VenusOS with only one device connected - either works fine. If I have anything in addition to the BMS connected at boot, only the BMS works.

I'm running firmware 2.80. Any suggestions on what I can try or how I can assist with testing this further? Seems at least one other person is having the same issue. I'm limited on firmware options due to having a newer RPI4.

 

[Louisvdw]

@calciumkid that does seem to be an issue on the venusos V2.80 and higher firmware. Best option at the moment is to downgrade to 2.7* firmware which you cannot do with the newer Pi4. I'm still trying to find the reason for the problem on 2.80+.
The serialbattery driver is the last driver to be tested on a serial port, so only when none of the other drivers worked will this the battery driver be tried.
So if your device is wrongly detected the first thing to try is to unplug that device and reconnecting it again to go through the driver dection sequence again.
Once I have more detail on how to fix that I will also update that ticket on github, so best to describe to it.

 

[juf]

@Louisvdw
Hi and thx for this driver.
have a question or wish.
dont see that the BMS do balancing

but it dos.
is it possible to implement this values pls.

regards

 

[davehopes]

What would your recommendations be for this driver and the JDB BMS?

 

[Louisvdw]

Use these settings

How to install · Louisvdw/dbus-serialbattery Wiki

dbus driver for serial battery in VenusOS . Contribute to Louisvdw/dbus-serialbattery development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

If I compare it to the settings in your table it will be like the MG Electronics

 

[michaeli]

So when I ordered my JKBMS a while back, I had them include a CANBUS module in the order. (I thought this might be useful).
I have two questions;
1) can this two wire output allow me to connect my jkbms to rpi/Venus ?
2) if not, what is the native output of the interface on the jkbms? Rs232? Rs485? Something else?
I really want to hook both of my jkbms protected batteries to venus

I also have a Victron smart shunt the I am just waiting for the usb cable that I ordered to show up from Amazon. If I can get the jkbms to connect, should I still use the smart shunt?

I also have two usb to serial adapters from Amazon that I bought hoping to diy my own ve.direct to usb cable but it didn’t work for me, hence why I ordered the $35 one from Victron.

Thanks in advance, I love communities like this. Cheers.

 

[upnorthandpersonal]

if not, what is the native output of the interface on the jkbms?

The output on the RS485 port on the BMS is TTL (RS232) - I know, confusing. You should be able to talk to it using a regular TTL/USB converter. The pin-out is in the description of my Gitrhub repo here: https://github.com/PurpleAlien/jk-bms_grafana

Once you have that hooked up, you can use the driver mentioned in this topic to have VenusOS interact with it.

 

[michaeli]

The output on the RS485 port on the BMS is TTL (RS232) - I know, confusing. You should be able to talk to it using a regular TTL/USB converter. The pin-out is in the description of my Gitrhub repo here: https://github.com/PurpleAlien/jk-bms_grafana

Once you have that hooked up, you can use the driver mentioned in this topic to have VenusOS interact with it.

that sounds promising. I purchashed this https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B09C89S4PB/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 . Do you happen to know which wire is tx and rx? I am pretty certain what red and black do