bluebattery.py

Software for interacting with the BlueBattery line of battery computers for RVs.

Features:

• Reading of periodically sent measurements
• Publishes value to an MQTT broker
• Auto-discovery of BB devices
• Persisting previously discovered BB device
• Access to stored logs
• Modification of device settings
• Firmware update

Installation

sudo apt-get install python3-pip
# log out and in again to apply new environment variables 
pip3 install git+https://github.com/danielfett/bluebattery.py.git

Reading values from the command line

$ bb_cli 

(If you run into troubles connecting to the device, or if there are multiple BB devices nearby, provide the MAC address of the device. It can be found in the BB app. E.g.: $ bb_cli AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF)

For an updating live view, first run

$ pip3 install rich

and then

$ bb_live 

Publishing values to an MQTT server

If you want to use the MQTT features, first run

pip3 install paho-mqtt

The start the MQTT publisher using

$ bb_mqtt --host my-mqtt.server.example

Use --collect to get a more concise MQTT output using JSON objects.

Use --prefix BBX to pass a specific device name. In this example, BBX.

For using the bb_mqtt as daemon described here

Troubleshooting

Depending on your environment, you may need to enable BLE first or to set up your linux user to allow using BLE:

Enabling Bluetooth LE

If the above command does not work out-of-the-box, you might have to enable Bluetooth Low-Energy.

On Ubuntu, add the following two lines at the bottom of /etc/bluetooth/main.conf:

EnableLE=true
AttributeServer=true

Then restart bluetooth: sudo service bluetooth restart

On the Raspberry Pi

This software works on a Raspberry Pi and was tested with the built-in bluetooth device. To use the software as the user pi (recommended!), you need to make the dbus policy changes described here.