Victron Energy VE.Direct UART data output capture via MQTT based on ESP32 Victron Energy VE.Direct UART data output to influxDB Cloud using Espressif ESP32 (based on the Arduino platform)
The idea of untying the Victron Energy Smart Solar MPPT 75/15 from the smartphone's BLE APP and being able to send it to an MQTT broker led me to create this project.
The VE.Direct interface, on most Victron Energy products, is in fact a UART that transmits at a record speed of one per second at 19200 baud.
It is necessary to create a simple adapter cable with the help of a JST 2.0 PH 4 connector easily available on both Amazon and Aliexpress.
For the pins of the UART port in question, I only used PINs 1 (GND) and 3 (TX), then connected to Serial2 of a "DEVIT V1 ESP32-WROOM-32 Development Board" (GND and GPIO16 ports).
Data flows from the UART port at a rate of 1 record/sec.
Detailed documentation of the fields, their format and content is collected here:
https://www.victronenergy.com/upload/documents/VE.Direct-Protocol-3.33.pdf
Once the record has been captured on the ESP32, needs to parse the fields and collect the data, of what we need, before sending to InfluxDB.2
In this new version 2.0 I used the official Victron Energy library "VeDirectFrameHandler" which is able to manage the "Chesum" field very well at the end of each record coming from a Victron device.
The "ParsingData.ino" function takes on, in this new version, a less relevant role and is no longer invoked for each entire record but rather for each field every time an entire and correct record is validated at Checksum level.
It's easy to create a free account on InfluxDB in the cloud, while for the more daring, you can download the entire suite needed for on-premise installation for a Raspberry PI for free.
You can start directly in the Cloud from here:
https://cloud2.influxdata.com/signup
Once logged into InfluxDB, you have to create a new Bucket (in short, a DB) and related Token which you then have to copy into the code attached here together with the ID of your organization. Easy.
When your Bucket is finally full of data you can decide to create a wonderful Dashboard on Grafana (always in the cloud, always free)
https://grafana.com/auth/sign-up/create-user?pg=hp&plcmt=hero-btn1&cta=create-free-account
With a little imagination and above all practice, you can even create dashboards like this:
(Grafana Dashboard file: Victron Energy-1700659129739.json)
the obviously "interesting" thing is that you can consult the data of your Victron Energy devices quickly and easily from anywhere and customize them as you prefer.