Thinking about both my SolarEdge battery and the custom driver I wrote to record the battery of my keyboard, mouse and other mobile devices like tablets and mobile phones... I.e. devices where battery charging and depletion happens on a regular basis, compared to more lengthy cycles for other IoT devices like battery powered remotes and sensors....
It would be nice to have a capability of battery status to record whether a battery is currently being:
Charged
Providing power (discharging)
Neither charging or discharging (Idle)
Unknown, this could be included to account for situations where communication with the battery device has been lost
Discuss....
Also, happy to be pointed to a built-in solution that already caters for this....
I just wish I had the skills to interface my hub to my Raspberry Pi that's running Victron Venus. The Venus software tells me everything I need to know (and more) but I've no idea how to make it talk to my hub. I've cobbled together a solution that has a z-wave dry contact sensor wired to the generator start relay on the Victron Multiplus inverter-charger. Whenever the batteries get down to 30% (LiFePO4), the relay opens the dry contact sensor. That tells the hub the sensor is open, which triggers a rule and turns on a Zooz high-current z-wave switch to send AC out to the otherwise solar-powered building. when the batteries hit 80% the gen start relay closes, which closes the dry contact sensor, and the switch turns off the power. It all feels a bit Rube Goldberg, but it works.
I could of course have the generator start relay actually start and stop a generator, but then I'd have to maintain the thing. I was easier to just trench in an AC line from the garage this summer. I should need it only 2-3 times in Nov-Dec when we have several days of no sun.
I can't claim to understand all the elements of what you are describing, but I at least understand a rpi and the possibility of an interface. Are you saying Victron Venus is some kind of application that runs on a rpi? And you don't know how to interact with it to make information available to HE?
What you're looking for would be cool. Unlike the examples noted above, it would be for an inherently portable device, although not so portable it gets out of Z-Wave/Zigbee range, lol.
What is interesting is that anything designated a "power source" seems to give you choices for triggering a rule. My "power sources" are the Ecolink siren/chime and 3 Zooz motion sensors that can (and are) powered by USB.
Hi Simon. Victron Energy, which makes exceptionally good solar energy equipment, is very supportive of open source software. They have a very active customer base in the marine community, but also in the off grid community, around the world. They have a device called the Cerbo GX that is used for monitoring their equipment. However, they also offer a free Linux application called Venus OS that runs on the Raspberry Pi. I run this today to monitor my Victron solar equipment that powers some outbuildings on our property, and I'm thinking about installing their equipment to power a home we're slowly building over 2-3 years (there are some other manufacturers I must consider given the size and scope of that building). Here are some links to more info about Venus on the RPi if you or others reading this are interested:
As noted in one or more of those links, Victron offers a "large" version of Venus that includes Node Red and Signal-K. I don't know beans about either, but strongly suspect that Node Red would allow me to interface Venus to Hubitat. So, I can't really encourage anyone to go out of their way to develop a Venus-Hubitat driver. But if someone became interested in Venus for their own use and did it, it would be a very interesting and useful thing for people who use both manufacturer's equipment, satisfying some of the earlier-mentioned use cases in this thread.
