As an avid end user of Victron’s products, I’m always delighted to hear of new and exciting developments.
This week, ‘Things’ have certainly ramped up in that department! It seems the programmers and developers have been very busy behind the scenes, working on both current and future enhancements to the VRM Portal and connected equipment.
But how best to describe what they have been up to? The quote below will hopefully help to set the scene for you, in the first instance.
“Add to that, intelligent systems integration whether it be for a smart house, boat, automotive, off grid, solar application et al., local and remote monitoring can be further enhanced using the Color Control GX via the online VRM portal. In choosing Victron today, The Internet of Things (IoT) just got that little bit smarter.”
The Internet of Things? Whilst this notion may be new to you, it is certainly applicable to the VRM Portal and the endless possibilities of what can be monitored and connected. There are many ‘Things’ we haven’t even thought of. Indeed ongoing development will also open up this area by moving toward the use of Open Source software, where end users, dealers and distributors can contribute to the projects. In other words we are only limited by our collective imagination and actions.
More on that later, but for now here are the latest enhancements.
GPS widget (Implemented)
This is how the live GPS widget looks in the main ‘Advanced’ tab of the VRM site when you have a USB GPS connected to your CCGX, such as a BU-353.
Below shows the on/off slider in the main ‘Settings’ tab under the sub menu ‘Advanced tab’. Note – by default the on/off slider shows closer to the bottom of the options on the VRM site, but for the purposes of a smaller image here I have simply dragged and dropped the slider closer to the top for this screenshot.
GPS positioning can be switched on or off to display a real time position for a vehicle or boat. Static sites without GPS can simply manually pin their position on the map.
Another area that is currently being worked on is to make GPS tracks downloadable.
Geofencing (Beta Testing)
A geo-fence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. This can be useful for boat or RV rental companies to ensure the hire vessel or vehicle stays within owner designated boundaries. In the example above we could ensure a boat stayed within inland waterway boundaries and did not venture out to sea.
VRM System overview improvements (Implemented)
This page has been much improved. Connected equipment now clearly shows the product name giving what, where, when and how the product is connected to your CCGX.
Update on Oceanvolt and Victron collaboration (beta)
This widget is a result of the symbiotic two-way relationship between Victron and Oceanvolt and shows data taken from the electric motor controller for the Oceanvolt electric propulsion system pictured below.
The test system in the Oceanvolt office can be seen on the VRM Portal by clicking the Try now button on the home page of https://vrm.victronenergy.com/. Note that logged in users need to log out first.
A slight side step: Victron is moving the source code of the Color Control into the public domain: Open Source. More about that in a later post, for now I juste wanted to link to the page on Github where Oceanvolt and Victron are working on the Color Control GX software that reads the data from the electric motors.
Other recently implemented VRM improvements
– several bugs in the presentation of IO Extender data which have now been fixed
– when zooming in on a graph in the main ‘Advanced tab’, all the other graphs now zoom in to match: click and hold left button of your mouse somewhere in a graph, and drag to select the part to which you want to zoom.
– in the main ‘Settings tab’, you may also notice a ‘Tags’ sub menu which can put tags to sites. This is in preparation for some new functionality and will be explained in a later post.
Future VRM improvements
These are the major items being worked on:
– finishing the geofences
– drastic improvement of data update rate when looking at an installation in a browser or mobile App. It will become almost real time!
– adding support to upload data saved by a CCGX to an SD card or USB stick, instead of uploading through a CCGX internet connection
– improved ‘Help’ for the VRM site. This is a Javascript (*.js) overlay on the VRM site which can be activated from a button, and will toggle help on and off for any given area of the site. It will look something like this.
Conclusion
As you can see there is plenty of in-house development going on to enhance the VRM Portal, but of course end users and indeed partners such as Oceanvolt have an important part to play too. This is where you – the end users, dealers and distributors and Open Source software (such as the Oceanvolt project) come in.
In conclusion and on that basis, we would like to extend an invitation to all VRM users to post their ideas and wishes below.
Maybe you can come up with even smarter Internet of Things (IoT) ideas for the VRM Portal, that we haven’t even thought of?
We look forward to hearing more….
