Venus OS driver for the Victron Buck-Boost DC-DC converter — no VE.Direct required

Been down this rabbit hole lately and thought it was worth bringing up here, because I reckon a few of you running boats or hybrid setups will have bumped into the same frustration.

The Buck-Boost (25A/50A/100A) is basically the black sheep of the Victron family — no VE.Direct, no Bluetooth, nothing. You can't see it in VRM, can't log what it's doing, can't integrate it properly into a Venus OS system. For something that sits right in the middle of your DC distribution doing critical work, that's a proper blind spot.

On my boat I've got the 50A unit managing the charge from my alternator bank into the lithium house bank, and for ages I was just... trusting it. Which felt wrong. Everything else — the MultiPlus, the SmartShunt, the MPPT — all talking nicely to the Cerbo. The Buck-Boost just sat there silently doing its thing.

Turns out there's work happening in the community to write a Venus OS driver that pulls data over the CAN-bus or USB without needing VE.Direct at all. Early days, but promising. It would give you DC input/output voltages, current, temperature — the works — right there in your GX dashboard.

What I'd love to know is whether anyone here has actually got something working, even a rough version. Also curious whether those of you using Buck-Boosts for EV charge management (I've been eyeing up a more integrated setup for that side of things) have found any workarounds in the meantime.

Seems like a gap Victron really should close officially, but until then — community to the rescue as usual.

@CarlWalker great timing on this thread — I've been sitting on almost exactly this problem with my motorhome build for a couple of months now.

Running a Victron Orion-Tr Smart 30A at the moment but seriously eyeing the Buck-Boost for when I upgrade the alternator setup. The lack of native Venus OS integration has been the one thing holding me back from pulling the trigger.

Few questions worth exploring for anyone developing a driver:

• Are you polling via VE.Can or intercepting the Bluetooth advertisement packets?
• What data points are actually exposed — input/output voltage, current, charge state?
• Any consideration for DVCC compatibility so Venus can properly arbitrate between the Buck-Boost and a shore inverter-charger simultaneously?

That last point matters enormously in a hybrid system — if Venus can't see the DC-DC, it'll make poor decisions about bulk/absorption cycling on the Multiplus.

Keen to test anything on my rig if you need guinea pigs.

@CarlWalker this is genuinely useful — I hit this exact wall on the narrowboat last spring. Had the Buck-Boost sitting between the alternator and my Victron lithium bank, completely invisible to the GX device, and it drove me mad watching the MPPT data whilst knowing half the charging picture was missing.

Ended up bodging together some voltage/current sensor readings fed through a Raspberry Pi running Venus OS Large, which... worked, sort of. Roughly. On a good day.

A proper driver pulling real data from the Buck-Boost would've saved me weeks of faff.

Keen to understand the connection method you're proposing — is this using the VE.Can side, or something via the diagnostic port? Because if it's the latter, I've got some notes on what that port actually exposes that might be handy.

@CarlWalker my cabin setup had a Buck-Boost gathering dust for three months because Venus OS just stared at it blankly — turns out a silent DC-DC is basically an expensive paperweight when your GX device thinks it doesn't exist.

@BatteryGill three months of dust is practically a Victron rite of passage at this point.

Running a similar Fogstar-banked setup in the shepherd's hut and the Buck-Boost invisibility on Venus OS was genuinely maddening — you've got this perfectly capable bit of kit doing real work and the GX device just acts like it doesn't exist.

The driver approach is interesting but I'd want to know how stable it holds across Venus OS minor updates before wiring it into anything critical. Victron have a habit of quietly reshuffling things underfoot.

Anyone tested persistence across a v3.x firmware bump without manually reinstalling? That's the bit I'd want nailed down before trusting it in an unattended cabin scenario.