Does anyone know if it's possible to read the battery info from Victron blue smart chargers?

Compatible devices
1

As title. I’m not sure if the information broadcast by Victron is some proprietary format or not.

Turns out the advertisements are encrypted. Can this be supported?
https://community.victronenergy.com/questions/93919/victron-bluetooth-ble-protocol-publication.html

2

The best support could be a decoder to decode any information encoded in the Bluetooth BLE advertising data, which also seems to be encrypted so that the encryption key would need to be retrieved by you, and only Theengs Gateway is currently supporting decryption.

For this, a more appropriate link would be this one, also giving information on how to retrieve the encryption key

https://community.victronenergy.com/questions/187303/victron-bluetooth-advertising-protocol.html

and in the comments a link to a GitHub repo already implementing the decryption and decoding for some Victron devices, which we could then implement in a similar way in a decoder, with your help of giving data samples and your testing with your encryption key.

3

I’d be more than happy to help with sample data and testing.

4

Can you start by installing Theengs Gateway on one of your machines? Usually easiest with a pip install.

And then give some sample encrypted and undecoded raw advertising data messages by starting Theengs Gateway with

-padv PUBLISH_ADVDATA, --publish_advdata PUBLISH_ADVDATA
                        Publish advertising and advanced data (1) or not (0)
                        (default: 0)

set to 1.

Can you also clarify which exact Victron model you have?

5

Heh - well, I have a lot of Victron gear, but I am particularly interested in gathering data from these: Blue Smart IP65 Charger (120V and 230V) - Victron Energy
I haven’t ordered one yet.
In the meantime I have some other devices I will try this with.

6

I’ve installed Theengs using WSL. It seems to install ok - I can see it connect to my mqtt server:
image
But, it doesn’t appear to be picking anything up. I can see devices using the nrf scanner, also the Victron bluetooth app.
Is this:

INFO:BLEGateway:Starting BLE scan
INFO:BLEGateway:Connected to MQTT broker
INFO:BLEGateway:Subscribed to home/+/BTtoMQTT/undecoded
ERROR:BLEGateway:[org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown] The name org.bluez was not provided by any .service files

an issue?

7

Is this information useful? I can try to grab
image
it as text later.

image

Oh, I missed the copy button:

0x0201061AFFE102100289A302B3B8F5EF9C2669E3B2E28F109D7CC484EEF91709536D6172745368756E7420485132313433524E585050

8

Personally I don’t have any experience with WSL, and

ERROR:BLEGateway:[org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown] The name org.bluez was not provided by any .service files

there definitely seems to be an issue with the Bluetooth service/adapter.

Best to log an issue for Theengs Gateway at

Yes, the advertising data, especially in the first screenshot, is the data which Theengs Decoder could use to decoder any encoded data, once decrypted, but it would be best to get it as Theengs Gateway MQTT messages, to see exactly how Gateway publishes this data, and for further decryption.

So once your Bluetooth/Bluez issue with Gateway is sorted out and you have Theengs Gateway running, it’s best to continue this, expectedly longer ;), decryption and decoding process in the Theengs Decoder discussions, at

Thanks

9

So I’m no bluetooth expert but I read that in Victron you can now enable GATT for the Smartsolar and Smartshunt and apparently enjoy unencrypted bluetooth.