Smart shunt and Ve.direct cable

[ostro37]

Hi, Apologies for asking what is probably a dumb couple of questions, but hoping you can advise me. (1) I don't yet have a Victron MPPT but will eventually when I fit solar panels. In the meantime, I plan to get a Victron smart shunt which also supports Ve.direct port. Do you think I'll have any problems getting your code to work with this? (2) Which cable did you use? I see there are many options, one of which comes with an RS232 plug on the end. Thanks for any advice you can offer

[ostro37]

Hi Rich. Forget question 2. I figured it out - obvious really once I'd read the specs of VE.direct. Still interested in your thoughts on question 1

[pmcg31]

Hello!

I think the code should work fine with a smart shunt. I would expect it to use the same messages as a BMV-712. I honestly haven't looked that this code in a while, so I'm not sure what I was doing in regard to identifying devices. If you run into a wall, let me know. I'll take a look at the code over the next couple of days to refresh my memory. Please let me know how you make out with the smart shunt. I'd like to know if it works with that without any changes.

As you said you figured out the connector. I just bought some pigtails on amazon that have the proper connector on them. If you're using an ESP32, there are 3 physical UARTS on it. So you can talk to 3 devices at once. However, you need to remap the pins used for the UART connected to GPIOs 9&10 because those pins are also used to talk to the flash memory. I forget whether that ends up being Serial2 or Serial3 (I'm guessing 2, but I have a terrible track record with 50/50 chances...). It's marked as TX1/RX1 on the pin diagram for the ESP.

Good luck and please don't hesitate to ask anything else!

--Rich

[ostro37]

Thanks Rich. I'll let you know how I get on - once all the hardware parts have arrived