Victron BLE HA Parser

Overview

This project exists solely to provide an interface to the excellent victron-ble project suitable for use with a Home Assistant integration. Thank you to Keshav Varma for maintaining the victron-ble project.

Installing the Home Assistant custom component

Currently the Home Assistant integration is only available as a custom component, for testing purposes and while we wait for certain PRs to merge into the upstream victron-ble project. The goal is to make this part of Home Assistant core.

If you'd like to test this, clone my fork on the HA project and checkout the victron-ble-custom-component branch:

git clone https://github.com/rajlaud/home-assistant.git --branch victron-ble-custom-component

Then, copy or symlink homeassistant/components/victron-ble into your config/custom_components folder.

Details

The parser module has one class, VictronBluetoothDeviceData, which parses Bleak advertisements and updates itself with the sensor data from the advertisement. Each instance of VictronBluetoothDeviceData should be fed advertisements from exactly one Victron device (based on the MAC address) and the instance needs to be initiated with the encryption key of the device that is going to be sending updates. If the encryption key is set correctly everything else will be figured out automatically.

There is a handy package from maintainers of the HA project called sensor-state-data to make it easy to automate ingesting sensor state updates like this. Unfortunately, we need to use a unit (amp-hours) not supported by the module and my PR to include amp-hours was rejected because they are not a common unit (https://github.com/Bluetooth-Devices/sensor-state-data/pull/47). For that reason, we need a custom extension of sensor-state-data, which is contained in the custom-sensor-state.py file.

Other notes

The upstream victron-ble has some un-merged pull requests that are necessary for this project. For now, it is set up to depend on my fork. Once a new release with the merged content is available on PyPI, I'll modify the package to point to the original project.