Victron VE Direct DIY Cable

If you broke or lost the VE.Direct cable for your Victron device, you can make your own. The original cable is a RS232/Serial-to-USB converter. This means that any device that appears as an COM/serial device in the operating system will work for this purpose.

Connection

Connection diagram:

Voltage: 5V - when the Victron solar charge controller is powered by the PV, you can leave the 5V pin unconnected Baud rate: 19200

Sample output of the continuous update stream for the live page in VictronConnect:

PID	0xA043				-- Product ID
FW	119			-- Firmware version of controller
SER#	HQXXXXXXXXX			-- Serial number
V	13790			-- Battery voltage
I	-10			-- Battery current
VPV	15950			-- PV voltage
PPV	0			-- PV power
CS	5			--
ERR	0			-- Errors
LOAD	ON			-- Load output status
IL	0			-- Load current
H19	0
H20	0
H21	397
H22	0 
H23	0
HSDS	0
Checksum	l:A0002000148			-- Message checksum
:A0102000543
:A0202000000000047
:AD7ED00000087
:AD4ED00008A

Materials

This requires the following parts:

• Adafruit FTDI 5V 1m adapter cable
• JST-PH 2.00mm pitch 4-pin with wires

Or build one from adapters, cable and connector:

• Sparkfun FTDI 5V RS232 Mini-USB adapter
• JST-PH 2.00mm pitch 4-pin connector
• 4 Wire cable 1m

Software

For Windows, download the USB drivers and install VConnect:

• Victron software downloads

For Mac, just download and install VConnect:

• Victron software downloads

Future

The next project is to try to use a Bluetooth LE serial adapter and try to make it work like a VE.Direct Bluetooth smart dongle.