pylon2mqtt

pylon2mqtt can periodically poll data from a Pylon Battery debug interface and publish to MQTT. It should run on Linux and Windows but since most people will likely run this on something like a Raspberry Pi, only instructions for Linux are shown here.

Required Hardware

You will need some sort of serial connection to the Pylontech battery. You can either build your own or buy a premade cable that embeds a USB->RS232 chip on one side and the custom RJ45 pinout on the other.

Installing

Get it from PyPI (you might want to do this in a virtualenv):

$ pip install pylon2mqtt

You should then have the pylon2mqtt CLI on your path.

Setting Up

First, it's probably a good idea to test if it works at all. Assuming your serial adapter is /dev/ttyUSB0, run:

$ pylon2mqtt test -s /dev/ttyUSB0

which should spit out values for all connected batteries. After confirming the basics work, you can give exporting to MQTT a try:

$ pylon2mqtt run -s /dev/ttyUSB0 -h mymqtthost.example.org

once you have it working with the desired flags, you can generate a systemd unit. Just replace run with generate-systemd and you'll get a systemd unit file that should use the right virtualenv/interpreter and set the flags you specified:

$ pylon2mqtt generate-systemd -s /dev/ttyUSB0 -h mymqtthost.example.org

Dealing with multiple serial adapters

If you have multiple USB->serial adapters plugged in, it might be a good idea to get a stable device symlink for it to avoid confusion. Use the following command to generate a udev rule to create a symlink:

$ pylon2mqtt generate-udev-rule -s /dev/ttyUSB0 

put the output into a rules file in /etc/udev/rules.d/ and then use the symlink instead of ttyUSB0.