Revov to Victron comms

I have a 2 X 5 Kva Victron setup with a Revov battery. 48 V 200A.

It has a BMS48150 monitor but there are no comms cable to the Victron Colour control.

Can I use a BYD to Victron cable.

Also - if someone has a system, what are your settings?

Admin. Just change the heading Revov/BYD/Victron.

@Thinus i spotted in BYD post with this setup and it's the same BMS that Rivov is using on there batteries. Best is to call Dawie of Revov. He will give you some info. 

Do you have some photos of your setup. I'm planning to get some Revov batteries for my setup to. 

OOOo yes @plonkster will give you more info on the Victron part. 

I am also very interested in how this is going to work with the Victron, IIRC they used the BYD BMS, but now have their own?

I have spoken to Dawie at Revov.

They have ordered comms cables that should be here next week.

The BYD to Victron cables won't work, as the software on the BMS's differ slighlty.

Will keep you updated once cable is in and what settings I am using.

At this stage it is running smooth but sure it will be better straight from the monitor.

1 x 5Kv Victron Easysolar in parallel with 5kv Victron. Total 10 Kva

12 x 310 w panels (north east)connected to Easysolar MPPT (150/100) and 6 x 310 w panels (south east)on separate Victron 150/60 MPPT.

1 x Revov 200A 10.2 kw battery. Don't have money for another one, but this should have been perfect.

2 hours ago, Thinus said:

It has a BMS48150 monitor but there are no comms cable to the Victron Colour control.

I know nothing about these batteries (other than that they are second life), and what I know about the BMS is what I heard. I heard that sometimes it ships with a BYD BMS, but apparently not always. So until corrected, I have to assume we don't know what BMS is in this.

So here is what I would do. Make sure you have the correct cable pin-out, you need cable type A, part number ASS030710018.

Then set the can profile for the first can port to 500kbaud with a can-bus bms. Then root your GX device (color control, Venus-GX, etc). Then once you're logged into it, you can use candump to see if there is any traffic on the can bus. On a CCGX, the can device is can0, on a Venus-GX it is can1. So then you do:

candump can0

And you should see something like

  can0  305   [8]  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
  can0  351   [8]  3A 02 64 00 64 00 A4 01
  can0  355   [6]  32 00 64 00 00 00
  can0  356   [6]  B4 14 64 00 F0 00
  can0  35A   [8]  A8 82 82 02 A8 82 82 02  
  can0  35E   [8]  42 59 44 00 00 00 00 00
  can0  35F   [8]  4C 69 01 02 00 00 00 00

Now I am not allowed to tell you what all those means, but the point is (regardless of what you see), that the can bus is actually working. If you don't see that, then make sure your can bus is terminated and all that.

Now there is one hint I can give you about the above. Look at 0x35E. in hex, that literally spells the name of the manufacturer.

Now if you get this far and it's still not working.... well then your BMS is probably not supported.

 

Thank you Plonkster,

Had a back operation last week and not very mobile at this stage.

If they don't get the cables by next week, I'll try this route.

1 hour ago, plonkster said:

42 59 44 00 00 00 00 00

With only 3 valid HEX values I think I know where this is going

 

1 minute ago, PJJ said:

With only 3 valid HEX values I think I know where this is going

Type "man ascii" and look in the Hex column 🙂

This info isn't a state secret. REC does the same and its documented clearly in a document that's publically available.

Now this Boertjie is completely lost!

Hex - language etc. Not a clue. If it's not English or Afrikaans, I'll have to ask a computer boffin.

083 625 7179 - if you have it in plain language.

Thanks

Hahahahahah!! Hex is computer language. 

You can use this : http://www.unit-conversion.info/texttools/hexadecimal/ Dan sal jy die antwoord kry. Jare terug moes ons dit geleer en toets geskrywe het. Dit is ook al n paar jaar terug by gese.

22 minutes ago, Thinus said:

Hex - language etc. Not a clue. If it's not English or Afrikaans, I'll have to ask a computer boffin.

No worries, @PJJ and myself are just having some fun. Basically, you may remember in the good old days if you wanted a special character you'd hold in the "alt" key and type a code. Especially us Afrikaans people would have to do that to get ê and ë and ô and so forth. Some people would have a printout next to their computers of all these special characters and their codes. Now this table is called the "ascii table", and it is the standard way in which computers encode text into stored numbers.

The above protocol uses the same numbers to spell out a name.

The numbers are however in what we call "hex", which means that instead of using a "normal people" base of 10, it uses a base of 16. Imagine having 16 fingers instead of just 10. The extra 6 digits are A thru E. So you count 0, 1, 2, ..., 9, A, B, C, D, E, F, 10, 11, 12, ..., 19, 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, 1E, 20... and so on and so forth.

Why 16? Well, because that is a power of two, and computers kinda have an affinity for powers of two because...well... a computer has just two fingers (zero and one), but writing everything out in binary would be really REALLY hard to work with for humans. Converting from decimal to binary is just as hard... so computer programmers prefer hex (base 16) or octal (base 8 ) numbers because it's just easier to visually work with.

But for normal humans... yeah... don't worry about it. It's just numbers that you can look up in a table.

Software developers can be quite weird. Years ago when my son was born, the nurses strapped this thing to my wife.

Not the actual item. I stole this image from the internet. This shows a fetal heartbeat of 133 (beats per minute) and there is a measured contraction of 15... somethings. Now get this. The number on the right tops out at 127. When the nurse told me that I just smiled knowingly.

(It's 2 to the power 7 minus one... in normal human terms it's pegged at 999).

I also noticed that my car radio's volume tops out at 63. Same thing. That's "99" for a 6-bit memory space. Why on earth Toyota (or their supplier) decided to use 6 bits... and what on earth they are doing with the other two... that's something that's probably incredibly interesting... if you can find someone to tell you!

19 minutes ago, plonkster said:

No worries, @PJJ and myself are just having some fun

The most fun I had was a few weeks ago when I showed a friend how I would store whether a user had access to multiple functions inside a app with a single HEX value  

1 hour ago, PJJ said:

multiple functions inside a app with a single HEX value

And you can check if a user has all the access requirements with a single bitwise AND operation 🙂  

And sometimes in traffic, you might send someone a binary 4.

48 minutes ago, plonkster said:

And you can check if a user has all the access requirements with a single bitwise AND operation 🙂  

I had long conversation with my boss sometime ago about how careful memory management and thoughtful programming practices are a dying art.

Nowadays even MCU's have tons of memory and processing power to spare! E.g : ESP32

It has turned people into lazy coders.

Thanks you guys for the info and lessons. Now I'm completely confused.

Not to worrry, will get my IT friend to help.

I recently had a Revov battery for a few days to test, and the Revov sales guy that brought the battery to me told me that their BMS is the same as the BYD BMS, but not running the same software. Their software actually doesn't support CAN, so you won't see any of those messages on the CAN bus. He did say they were working on getting one with CAN.

If you just want to monitor the battery from a PC, there is monitoring software available (I have it if anybody wants) which requires a USB to RS485 converter.

Then you need to make a special cable with an RJ45 connector that plugs into the battery. RS485 uses pins 1 and 2 of the RJ45 connector, with Pin 1 being A or + and pin 2 being B or -

The monitoring software will give you SOC and voltage, as well as voltage of each cell and whether balancing is active also any alarms or warnings will be shown.

6 minutes ago, Stanley said:

I recently had a Revov battery for a few days to test, and the Revov sales guy that brought the battery to me told me that their BMS is the same as the BYD BMS, but not running the same software. Their software actually doesn't support CAN, so you won't see any of those messages on the CAN bus. He did say they were working on getting one with CAN.

They seem to source whatever BMS they can find at a reasonable price. Many of these BMSes do have dry contacts to signal stop charge/discharge conditions. You can use those together with the two-signal BMS (built into the ESS assistant, or as a separate assistant for off grid installations) and get the same functionality: The Multi will stop discharging/charging when the battery requests it. The only thing you don't have in this case is 1) an SOC measurement, so you will rely either on the Multi or you need to install a BMV-700/702/712, and 2) you don't have charge and discharge current control (where the BMS mandates how much current can be used to charge and discharge it).

Charge and Discharge actually isn't THAT important for most batteries. For some chemistries it is (eg LG Resu), but you can really get away without it especially if you have size the battery such that you're unlikely to run at the limits anyway.

On 2019/10/24 at 12:18 PM, plonkster said:

Now I am not allowed to tell you what all those means

Pylon (and many other batteries) use pretty much the same CAN messages, and the Pylon CAN documentation is freely available, so it should be easy to figure out what those messages mean if you need to.

48 minutes ago, Stanley said:

Pylon (and many other batteries) use pretty much the same CAN messages, and the Pylon CAN documentation is freely available, so it should be easy to figure out what those messages mean if you need to.

Yup. Point is... many manufacturers require you to sign an NDA before they tell you the whole story. The majority of the stuff is not hard, that's pretty much 0x351, 0x355, 0x356 and either 0x35A or 0x359. If you look at the REC documentation and the Pylontech documentation, you essentially understand 99% of the spectrum 🙂

 

1 hour ago, plonkster said:

For some chemistries it is (eg LG Resu), but you can really get away without it especially if you have size the battery such that you're unlikely to run at the limits anyway.

Spot on, I think the saving grace here for Revov's is sheer size, I mean if you have a single 10kWh module, you can discharge at C0.25 which is extremely low for LFP and still have ~2.5KW of output power.

I am not sure about most people, but for my needs 2.5KW is more than sufficient (pretty much the rated output of a 3000VA Multi anyway.) 

@Stanley and @plonkster will this unit maybe work for this? https://www.sonopsolar.co.za/product/byd-b-box-bmu/

https://www.victronenergy.com/live/battery_compatibility:byd_b-box-steps

https://www.victronenergy.com/live/battery_compatibility:byd_b-box

3 hours ago, Gerlach said:

will this unit maybe work for this?

As far as I know -- that is to say I leave a 10% margin of error or so 🙂 -- each battery has its own BMS (current sensor, battery balancing stuff, etc), but then they all connected to together to a single BMU... and this then talks to your GX device.

The BMU only helps you if you already have the corresponding BYD stuff in the battery itself, which is exactly what we suspect not to be the case.

@plonkster loer gou die foto wat ek bo gepost het. Daar is ook een wat aan die BMS gekoppel is. Ek sal kyk waar ek die post raak gesien het.