mrpher / tronmon

Tronmon the Victron monitor. Monitor your solar devices with VE.Direct and a Raspberry Pi.

Tronmon is a work-in-progress tool to monitor (and maybe one day control) Victron solar devices. It utilizes a VE.Direct -> USB cable to capture metrics from any SmartSolar MPPT solar charger. When combined with a Raspberry Pi it permits sending those metrics wherever you like using the Paho MQTT library.

Currently it is configured to work with Victron's SmartSolar charge controllers, but could be easily adapted to any Victron device supporting the VE.Direct protocol.

Why

I think you know why.

Requirements

You'll need a couple things to get started.

• Any Victron device supporting VE.Direct, like the SmartSolar MPPT 75/10
• A VE.Direct to USB ⚠️
• Any Raspberry Pi with a USB port
• A high quality LiFePO4 battery
• A Sixfab PowerHAT

⚠️ Yes, it's overpriced. Yes, you could make your own cable. No, it's not worth your time. Just buy the real thing.

Configuration

Simple configuration can be done via environment variables.

Variable	Default	Description
SERIAL_PORT	/dev/ttyUSB0	The serial port that corresponds to the VE.Direct connection
MQTT_BROKER	broker.hivemq.com	The MQTT broker URL
MQTT_PORT	1883	The MQTT broker port
MQTT_TOPIC	{ device_id } /tronmon/uplink	The default topic (ie. 1234567/tronmon/uplink). If BALENA_DEVICE_ID is not found, will default to "default" (ie. default/tronmon/uplink)

Credits

Tronmon is based largely on the incredible work from karioja/vedirect.

The core of which has been translated into the lib/protocol.py library here.