How to read the Vaillant eBus

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  • bruce_miranda
    Automated Home Legend
    • Jul 2014
    • 2309

    #16
    you can also use the many Arduinos that include an FTDI on board itself too. instead of using two boards.

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    • OpenMike
      Automated Home Jr Member
      • Dec 2018
      • 11

      #17
      True, but I already have the boards.

      Anyway, thanks for all the advice and have a happy Xmas!

      Mike

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      • OpenMike
        Automated Home Jr Member
        • Dec 2018
        • 11

        #18
        Happy New Year everyone.

        My little boiler logging project has been quite successful. The water temperature readings aren't particularly accurate but it's the boiler on/off cycles I'm interested in.

        Here are some results with three different combinations of pump speed and anti-cycle time. The first one seems to be microfiring. Do the others look vaguely correct?

        Mike

        boiler_1.jpg
        boiler_2.jpg
        boiler_3.jpg

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        • harrym1byt
          Automated Home Lurker
          • Feb 2019
          • 3

          #19
          Originally posted by bruce_miranda View Post
          you can also use the many Arduinos that include an FTDI on board itself too. instead of using two boards.
          I am very new to all of this, but I should like to just be able to read and log boiler data - flow and return temps, pump, firing and Kw, cylinder temperature, heating or HW. I have now wish to control anything.

          I had a new Vaillant ECOfit Pure 418 installed last March, in the past month I have added a VR65, VRC470F, VR21 outdoor sensor and VR10 cylinder sensor. All is working absolutely fine, but now I just want to be able to log things - preferably on my Win10 laptop. I have a RPi dedicated to recording my weather station data.

          In the 1980's I was well into microprocessors and programming, but most of the modern stuff has since passed me by, so I am starting from scratch and completely lost. I have the house wired for LAN and a couple of wifi AP's.

          I hope I guessed correctly, because I ordered an Arduino Nano with built in FTDI and I think I can probably enter that software into it when it arrives, but beyond that - what next?

          I have downloaded a copy of Vaillant's Vrdialog on my PC, will that maybe work directly with the USB of the Nano? Assuming I must use a RPi to translate the Arduino's output, could the RPi (V 3 B+) cope with simultaneous weather logging and boiler? If not, what is the minimum spec of RPi which would be suitable.

          Sorry for all the numpty questions, but it is a rather steep initial curve.

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          • OpenMike
            Automated Home Jr Member
            • Dec 2018
            • 11

            #20
            Hi, don't worry about numpty questions, I have a similar background to you and a similar learning curve!

            First off, the easiest solution to meet your requirement would be to buy the Vaillant diagnostic kit. It's hard to find these days, but if you're in the UK then you could try these people as they claim to have it in stock:



            For my own system, which simply logs temperature sensors attached to the flow and return pipes, I use an Arduino Pro Mini with separate FTDI module for programming. I detach the FTDI while it's running to reduce currect consumption.

            I haven't tried it, but some people have had success reading the Vaillant's eBus with just an Arduino using this circuit:

            my various Arduino projects. Contribute to dpavlin/Arduino-projects development by creating an account on GitHub.

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            • bruce_miranda
              Automated Home Legend
              • Jul 2014
              • 2309

              #21
              I can confirm that the Arduino circuit mentioned above works absolutely fine. But is READ only. So you will get the ebus data. You will still need software like ebusd or similar to actually make sense of that ebus data byte stream. This is where the RPI comes in. I have a NAS sitting near my boiler, so my software runs on the NAS itself. The software turns the byte stream into individual messages, that you then have to parse for the values you are interested in.

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              • dty
                Automated Home Ninja
                • Aug 2016
                • 489

                #22
                Also bear in mind that you can only read messages that happen to be flying around on the bus. If you're after something that's not actively being talked about by one of the components on the bus then you'll need to build a proper adaptor to allow you to write to the bus to request the data you're after.

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