I am a newcomer and thus have no idea so far how to deploy all the required tools for establishing a home energy storage system using a victron battery inverter. I am running home assistant already on an RPI 4 ; for the victron installation Venus OS is required, and Node RED. My intention is to get control over the victron system using the HA node red companion integration. My doubts are: do I need additional hardware (another PI?) for Venus OS and Node RED? I think yes, first of all because the HA PI is in another location in my house and cannot be moved. But then - if the Node RED is running on another PI, together with Venus OS, will I be able to establish the communication between HA and Node RED easily through the network? Maybe I am asking silly questions, but this usually happens if you can‘t find basic documentation about what you want to do. Hope somebody can help me further!
I am pretty sure the HA integration nodes can be installed onto a Node-RED instance that is NOT running as a HA plug in. You will have to ask on the HA forum to be 100% certain.
The recommendation that you will generally get here is not to use HA at all, and to do it all in node red and whatever else is needed. So I suggest that you don't use HA unless you have a specific need that requires it.
Colin,
Its ok if you don‘t like HA, that‘s everybody‘s private opinion, and I respect it. But I‘m using it now as an HMI for my complete home automation system, including about 1800 datapoints in KNX, a Zigbee wireless network for my garden irrigation, my heating system including a heat pump, and the solar energy generation and storage system, including already 4 inverters and one battery. So my intention for sure is not to move all this now to Node RED, but to find a way how I can implement another ESS based on a Victron grid controlled battery inverter. From all I have read about this so far, I‘m pretty sure that I need some sort of Node RED integration to control the new Victron inverter, making usage of all available data from the existing „legacy“ system. And … I have to begin at a certain point to see eventually clearer, how to built up this new part of my home automation system. HA in this context will only be the visualization, not the logic. But still some data, e.g. electricity meters, come from KNX. So I should ask differently: Does Node RED have a KNX integration (via TCP or UDP)? Because then I could manage the Victron inverter probably direct from Node RED.
You said you were a newcomer, so I assumed you were not already using HA.
That isn't my opinion. I have not used it so I don't like or dislike it. All I know is what I read here, that many have problems and their support seems patchy.
Did you note Steve's suggestion to consider using node red standalone, with the HA nodes installed, rather than using the HA node red plugin? The issue with using the plugin is that when there are problems we don't know whether they are due to the modified version of node-red in the plugin or are real node-red problems, so support is difficult.
For victron I suggest searching the forum to see what has already been done, and also flows.nodered.org.
Search the forum for victron - i'm pretty certain i have seem quite a few threads and fairly certain they mostly discuss the use of modbus protocol or a specific node like node-red-contrib-victron (node) - Node-RED
And re KNX - see node-red-contrib-knx (node) - Node-RED
Thanks Colin,
I got a very important hint from the victron forum: Node RED runs in the extended Venus OS. And there is an integration for KNX in Node RED as well. That was exactly what I was looking for!
Good idea - but unfortunately way too old. The github depository is from 2016! There was one major change in the KNX world since then: Secure communication! This is not included in this old integration, and unfortunately - I‘m using it on the backbone (IP) level. And would for sure not go back to the previous unsecure state. So the only way to get messages from KNX into Node RED is for the moment a not very nice one: HA! Not very nice only means: The messages have to be sent double before arriving on each other‘s side, so the error likelihood is bigger. Hopefully somebody will improve the KNX contrib to Node RED soon!
Just found a recent KNX contribution: GitHub - Supergiovane/node-red-contrib-knx-ultimate: Control your KNX intallation via Node-Red! A bunch of KNX nodes, with integrated Philips HUE control and ETS group address importer.
If someone wants to access KNX via Node RED, he should use this one!
