installing directly in HA

[Abudinka]

I am running a Raspi4 B with native installation of HA.

It seems like there is no easy way to build libscrc on that machine. I was wondering if anybody could supply a binary for that or one could get rid of the dependency, so we could run this script on native HA?

[cyrils]

I've removed libscrc dependency.

[Abudinka]

well now iam dealing with missing dbus, probably gonna look at Issue #12 and google a bit.

edit: i am indeed running into the same issues as @marcuslib did, now something about 'gi' - no idea what this is

could go with the nested docker, but not sure if i like it. overhead seem a bit unnecessary. but a new HA/debian based raspi installation seem overkill as well.

[cyrils]

Were you able to resolve the issue? May be installing dbus-python will help

[Abudinka]

unfortunately no, terminal says dbus is installed, but wont find it when running the script.

when i finally got dbus out of the way, its complaining about gi instead

i dont know if the script some kind of raspberry exclusive, but couldnt make gatt work with ubuntu either

[marcuslib]

I got it to work in the end by installing HA in docker and then had to install python within a VM. To run it i then had to create a service to run the python script, it will also check if its running and if not run it, as I did find it took a few times to run the script for it to pickup the BT-1.

[Abudinka]

I got it to work in the end by installing HA in docker and then had to install python within a VM. To run it i then had to create a service to run the python script, it will also check if its running and if not run it, as I did find it took a few times to run the script for it to pickup the BT-1.

yes, i noticed. But i dont want to move HA back to docker. I used to use docker, but couldnt use addons, so i switched to native.

I dont really understand why gatt is behaving the way it does. maybe we can dockerize the whole thing to make it easier? i tried something along the lines, but ran into the very same issues. plus you need some way to expose bt to the docker.

I will most likely try a different ble interface and clone the renogy logic, dont know tbh

[Abudinka]

update: since the SoC supplied by the bluetooth is not accurate, so there is no need to implement it in HA for me

[didi767]

@Abudinka is there a guide on how to implement this in HA? I'm not an expert, but I was planning to install Ubuntu and then HA on my orange pi zero 3. Im sure it would be an adventure to figure this out, but if you have any clear steps on how to achieve it that would be awesome. At first i thought about going with the RS485 method until I saw that we can actually interpret the BL2, which is amazing!

[Abudinka]

sorry cant help here, as i said i dropped attempting renogy bluetooth communication since there is nothing to gain for me. if available i recommend using the home assistant raspberry pi image directly instead of using ubuntu. initially i used ubuntu and HA docker, but it has some drawbacks like no addon support. switched to raspberry pi 4B and used the HA image available in Raspberry Pi Imager.

[lbeckingsale]

I'd still be interested in getting this to work directly in HA. I'll have a tinker with it and see if I can work it out.

[cruscio]

Ran into Module 'dbus' not found on headless Raspberry PI. Something in all of this fixed it:

pip3 install --user -r requirements.txt
sudo apt-get install python3-dbus
sudo apt install libdbus-1-3 libdbus-1-dev
sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev
sudo apt install python3-pydbus
python3 -m pip install --user dbus-python

And then I ran into

  File "/home/cruscio/.local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/gatt/gatt_linux.py", line 13, in <module>
    from gi.repository import GObject
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'gi'

Which should be fixed by running

pip3 install --user PyGObject

But that fails ... So then:

sudo apt install libcairo2 libcairo2-dev
pip3 install --user PyGObject

Another new failure. Log says to install libgirepository1.0-dev

sudo apt install libgirepository1.0-dev
pip3 install --user PyGObject

Finally! The PyGObject install worked, though it might have been easier to install libgtk2.0-dev (which a stackoverflow post for libglib2.0-dev mentioned

And now I get

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'requests'

./facepalm

pip3 install --user requests

ANNNNND finally ...

python3 ./example.py config.ini
INFO:root:Init BatteryClient: BT-TH-XXXXXXXX => XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
INFO:root:Adapter status - Powered: True
INFO:root:Starting discovery...

Couple thoughts:

1. @cyrils - It seems a few requirements are missing from requirements.txt (not complaining. I definitely appreciate all the work you've shared here. Just wanted to call out that it may be worth adding all the requirements to requirements.txt :) )
2. I don't understand why there are so many things (glib2, cairo, GObject) that seem tied to GTK in a non-gui application...? (maybe this has something to do with accessing BT?)

Now if only I could figure out how to discover my battery info without needing to dismantle my battery box to muck with the daisy chain. (Bluetooth logging while running the android app shows chatter in wireshark, but I'm not smart enough to decipher it :( )

Anyway - I hope this helps others with similar issues.

[cyrils]

Hm.. I think the gatt library uses these for some reason. A regular raspberry pi image includes all of these by default, never tested it over headless image. Doesn't hurt to include them into requirements.txt though.

And unfortunately the app does not show the device id. Currently the only way to get the individual Ids is to connect one device at a time. However you can try some usual suspects for batteries:

33, 34, 35.. series
48, 49, 50..
97, 98..
247, 248..

[Abudinka]

update:

came back to the this project out of curiosity, made it work on ubuntu earlier today, still some prerequisites, but its working now, ill post my history, trying to highlight the most relevant commands, this is works "on my machine" stuff , look for <--

  456  source .vevn/bin/activate
  457  pip install -r requirements.txt
  458  sudo apt install dbus-python
  459  apt search dbus-python
  460  pip install dbus-python
  461  gcc -version
  462  sudo apt install gcc  <--
  463  pip install -r requirements.txt
  464  apt search dbus
  465  sudo apt install python3-dbus
  466  sudo apt install dbus
  467  pip install -r requirements.txt
  468  sudo apt install pkg-config cmake <--
  469  pip install -r requirements.txt
  470  sudo apt install dbus-1
  471  sudo apt install build-essential libpython3-dev libdbus-1-dev  <--
  472  pip install -r requirements.txt
  473  sudo apt install glib-2.0
  474  apt search glib
  475  sudo apt install libglib2.0-0
  476  sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev <--
  477  pip install -r requirements.txt
  478  pip install pycairo
  479  dpkg -h
  480  dpkg --help
  481  sudo apt install cairo
  482  sudo apt install python3-cairo
  483  ^[[200~Package 'cairo', required by 'virtual:world', not found
  484  ~Package 'cairo', required by 'virtual:world', not found\n
  485  sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install pkg-config libcairo2-dev libpython3-dev gcc <--
  486  ~Package 'cairo', required by 'virtual:world', not found\n
  487  pip install -r requirements.txt
  488  apt search gobject
  489  sudo apt install libgirepository1.0-dev  <--
  490  pip install -r requirements.txt
  491  l
  492  python3 ./example.py config.ini

trying to get it run on HA OS now, different kind of beast cause it does not come with apt but apk which i am not familiar with at all