Hi all,
I tried googling but didn’t find the answer that would explain a few questions I have.
I tried and configured the Venus GX and connected it to my HA via MQTT successfully.
At the moment, all Victron sensors I have are modbus based.
Questions I have: is there a benefit of obtaining data from Victron via MQTT vs Modbus?
I did read the general explanation of protocol differences, MQTT is newer, more secure, blah, blah, but is that applicable in a closed network (protected from www) and with Victron to RaspberryPi4 combination?
Second question I have (never reached this point) - once MQTT is configured with Venus GX and HA, I never saw any new entities or sensors from Victron in HA.
How would the MQTT Victron data and devices be shown in HA?
Sensors, entities, etc?
(I did have automation running that was refreshing every 30sec and I have checked with MQTT Explorer that all was configured in order - followed this: Link
MQTT on the GX is quite CPU hungry, and it needs a keepalive message to be sent to keep it going. Modbus uses less resources and is probably a little easier to configure. That’s a point for modbus.
But MQTT tends to be a little better maintained, more people working on it, less likely to break in weird ways when upgrading HA.
There isn’t much difference in security, honestly.
Once I actually get time to do the proper MQTT discovery stuff, MQTT will be easier. Venus 2.80 also includes some work to lower the CPU of that process.
You would have to write your own definitions in yaml. And somehow sort out the keepalive issue. I have never done it, sorry to say, I’ve always gone with modbus for the reasons mentioned above. But soon… it will hopefully just work.
The other “problem” is that the data will be sent every time it changes , instead of at x interval , so you end up with a massive amount of data running on the network. On modbus you select what you want to use / need. If you are running node red you could also get the data via modbus and then post to mqtt for HA.
