I have a campervan with an LTE router, a Raspberry Pi 5, several ESP32s, and multiple Victron Energy devices. On the RPi5 I run Node-RED.
What I want to do:
I’d like to interact with the Victron devices via Node-RED on the RPi.
The problem:
So far I’ve only found information about running Node-RED directly on the Cerbo, which I don’t want to do. On the RPi5, I haven’t managed to establish a working connection yet. I tried the @victronenergy/node-red-contrib-victron palette, but without success.
My question:
Do I need to use a different palette, or is there another approach to connect Node-RED on the Pi to Victron/Cerbo GX?
Victron offers venus OS also for imstalling on a Raspberry- with Nodered build in. Than the communication with Victron devices works without problems. Probably most of internal victron-communication works on your cerbo or in Venus OS D-Bus based. This is an internal Linux bus.
I believe, if you really don’t want to install Venus OS on your raspberry ( which would be much more performant than the cerbo) I would ask for help in the big victron community..
I believe the Cerbo can communicate with Modbus-TCP and MQTT - so you could use either of those nodes within Node-RED on the Pi to try to talk to it... but I have no idea how you configure the Cerbo to use those to do what you need on the other side. If you do use MQTT you would also need a broker running somewhere (probably Mosquito broker on the Pi would be simplest).
A MQTT-Broker is imcluded in Venus OS- you simple can switch this on at the remote console!
But so far I know, the victron devices don’t send signals on MQTT out of the box.
