Home Assistant Add-on: BatMON

Monitor and control various Battery management systems (BMS) over Bluetooth. This add-on reads the BMS and sends sensor
data through MQTT to Home Assistant. Using bluetooth on the Home Assistant host system, it does not need any additional
hardware (no USB, Serial, RS485 or ESP32). It can also run without HA on Linux, macOS and Windows.

I created this to compare BMS readings for a detailed evaluation of BMS reliability and accuracy.

Features

• Uses Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) for wireless communication
• Captures SoC, Current, Power, individual cell voltages and temperatures
• Monitor multiple devices at the same time
• Energy consumption meters (using trapezoidal power integrators)
• Integrates with Home Assistant Energy dashboard and Utility Meter sensor helper
• Control BMS charging and discharging switches
• Home Assistant MQTT Discovery
• Can run as stand-alone app without Home-Assistant an directly write to InfluxDB
• Battery Groups for parallel batteries, see doc/Groups.md
• Charge Algorithms, see doc/Algorithms.md
• Short delays for responsive automation (fast load shedding)
• Experimental serial communication (e.g. using USB-UART adapter)
• Current sensor gain calibration

Supported Devices (bluetooth low energy)

Batmon comes with connectors for some popular BMS. It also wraps aiobmsble, which includes many other BMS for
read-only access.

batmon device connectors:

• JK BMS / jikong with JK02 protocol (jk)
• Daly BMS (daly, daly2, daly_ble)
• JBD / Jiabaida/ Xiaoxiang / Overkill Solar BMS (jbd)
• ANT BMS (ant)
• CBT Power / Creabest BMS (cbtpwr)
• Seplos BMS (seplos, seplos_v2)
• Supervolt BMS (supervolt)
• SOK BMS (sok)
• Tian-Power BMS (tianpwr)
• LiTime BMS (litime) @KOSSOII
• Victron SmartShunt (make sure to update to the latest firmware
  and enable GATT
  in the VictronConnect app) (victron)
• ATORCH CW20 DC (cw20)

aioblebms device connectors:

• tdt
• ej
• abc
• dpwrcore
• ecoworthy
• ective
• felicity
• ogt
• redodo
• roypow
• braunpwr
• neey
• pro
• renogy, renogy_pro
• all devices aiobmsble supports

You can switch from the batmon to the aiobmsble connectors, just append a _ble to the type field, e.g. instead
of type: daly (batmon), write type: daly_ble (aiobmsble). This can help if you experience connection issues, because
some of the aiobmsble connectors are more up to date.

I tested the add-on on a Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 using Home Assistant Operating System.

Installation

• Go to your Home Assistant Add-on store and add this
  repository: https://github.com/fl4p/home-assistant-addons
  
• Install Batmon add-on
• Install, configure and start Mosquito MQTT broker (don't forget to configure the MQTT integration)

Configuration

The add-on can read multiple BMS at the same time.
Add an entry for each device, such as:

- address: CC:44:8C:F7:AD:BB
  type: jk
  alias: battery1            # MQTT topic prefix (regex [\w_.-/])
  pin: "12345"               # pairing PSK, victron only (optional)
  adapter: "hci0"            # switch the bluetooth hw adapter (optional)
  debug: true                # verbose log for this device only (optional)
  current_calibration: 1.0   # current [I] correction factor (optional)

address is the MAC address of the Bluetooth device. If you don't know the MAC address start the add-on, and you'll
find a list of visible Bluetooth devices in the add-on log. Alternatively you can enter the device name here as
displayed in the discovery list.

type can be jk, jk_24s, jk_32s, jbd, ant, daly, daly2, cbtpwr, seplos, seplos_v2, supervolt,
sok, tianpwr, victron or any tag listed under Supported Devices.
For a mock BMS use dummy.

With the alias field you can set the MQTT topic prefix and the name as displayed in Home Assistant.
Otherwise, the name as found in Bluetooth discovery is used.

If the device requires a PIN when pairing (currently Victron SmartShunt only) add pin: "123456" (and replace 123456
with device's PIN).

Add adapter: "hci1" to select a bluetooth adapter other than the default one.

With current_calibration you can calibrate the current sensor. The current reading is multiplied by this factor. Set
it to -1 to flip the sign if you experience wrong charge/discharge meters.

For verbose logs of particular BMS add debug: true.

• Set MQTT user and password. MQTT broker is usually core-mosquitto.
• concurrent_sampling tries to read all BMSs at the same time (instead of a serial read one after another). This can
  increase sampling rate for more timely-accurate data. Might cause Bluetooth connection issues if keep_alive is
  disabled.
• keep_alive will never close the bluetooth connection. Use for higher sampling rate. You will not be able to connect
  to the BMS from your phone anymore while the add-on is running.
• sample_period is the time in seconds to wait between BMS reads. Small periods generate more data points per time.
• Set publish_period to a higher value than sample_period to throttle MQTT data, while sampling BMS for accurate
  energy meters. On publish, samples since previous publish are averaged. Periods shorter than 2s can slow down history
  plots in HA.
• invert_current changes the sign of the current. Normally it is positive during discharge, inverted its negative.
• expire_values_after time span in seconds when sensor values become "Unavailable"
• watchdog stops the program on too many errors (make sure to enable the Home Assistant watchdog to restart the add-on
  after it exists)
• For JK bms: set type to jk_24s for the older 24s version (firmware<11.x), jk_32s for the newer 32s version (fw>
  =11.x), or jk if you don't know (might cause invalid battery data when detection fails)
• type daly2 is for a newer Daly BMS version which is untested

Energy Meters

Batmon implements energy metering by computing the integral of power values from the BMS with the trapezoidal rule. You
can add theses meters to your Home Assistant Energy Dashboard or use them with the HA Helper Utility Meter,
see doc/HA Energy Dashboard.md.

• Total Energy Discharge Meter: total Energy out of the battery (increasing only, use this for the Energy Dashboard)
• Total Energy Charge: total Energy into the battery (increasing only, use this for the Energy Dashboard)
• Total Energy: The total energy flow into and out of the battery (decreasing and increasing).
  This equals to (Total Energy Charge) - (Total Energy Discharge). It will increase over time because batteries are
  not ideal. You can create a derivative helper to compute energy flow within e.g. 24h.
• Total Cycles: Total full cycles of the battery. One complete discharge and charge is a full cycle: SoC 100%-0%-100%.
  This is not a value provided by the BMS, Batmon computes this by differentiating the SoC (
  e.g. integrate(abs(diff(SoC% / 100 / 2)))).

The accuracy depends on the accuracy of the voltage and current readings from the BMS.
Consider these having an error of 2~5%. Some BMS do not detect small currents (<200mA) and can miss high frequency
peaks, leading to even greater error.

Troubleshooting

• Power cycle (turn off and on) the BMS Bluetooth hardware/dongle (or BMS)
• Enable bt_power_cycle. If it doesn't work, manually power cycle Bluetooth on the host you are running batmon
  on #91.
• When experiencing unstable connection enable keep_alive
• TimeoutError: timeout waiting: put BT devices closer, disable inverters and other EMI sources
• Enable verbose_log and check the logs. If that is too noisy set debug: true in the BMS configuration as described
  above
• Try to find the BMS with a BLE
  scan (Chrome Browser, linux)
• After a long-lasting bluetooth connection is lost both Daly and JBD dongles occasionally refuse to accept new
  connections and disappear from bluetooth discovery. Remove wires from the dongle and reconnect for a restart.
• Some users reported unstable Bluetooth connection with Raspberry Pi 4 onboard bluetooth hardware and WiFi enabled. It
  appears that disabling WiFi helps. (#42)
• Cheap inverters might cause heavy EMI (electromagnetic interference). Turn them off or keep them away from the
  bluetooth
  hardware
• Either bleak or bluetooth support in HA docker seems unstable. see related
  issues 106 109
• Try another bluetooth hardware. Note you can choose the adapter with adapter parameter for each BMS individually
• doc/Downgrade.md to ab earlier version
• to see more log entries, run this in the Terminal add-on: ha host logs --identifier addon_<slug>_batmon. You'll find
  the slug in the URL of the add-on page.
• to see logs during installation: Settings / System / Logs / Supervisor (choose from the menu at the top-right
  corner), link

TODO

• Implement daly2 #33
• Port to MicroPython for MCU (ESP32 etc.)
• make this a custom
  integration? home-assistant-bms-tools-integration
• use the new Bluetooth integration since HA 2022.8 ?
• Implement BMS data push (JK)
• Read device bt info see
• Implement RS485 #22
• Implement old JK04?
• web interface (export, import bms meter data)

Stand-alone

You can run the add-on outside of Home Assistant (e.g. on a remote RPI sending MQTT data of WiFI).
All you need is an operating system supported by bleak.
See doc/Standalone.md

Contribute / Donate

• PayPal
• Patreon (Donations & News)

References

• daly bms: similar add-on
• JK-BMS: similar add-on using ESP-Home (needs extra hardware)
• Daly_RS485_UART_Protocol.pdf
• JK-bms esphome
• JK02 protocol