Two years ago I shared sbam with this old post because I wanted something smarter than the static time-based charging built into Fronius.
sbam (Smart Battery Advanced Manager) looks at the solar forecast, battery state of charge, reserve threshold, and household consumption to decide when grid charging actually makes sense.
Today I’m releasing sbam v2.0.0, and this is the biggest update so far.
The headline changes are:
- built-in MQTT support
- Home Assistant MQTT auto discovery (no manual yaml for entities)
- live sensors, diagnostics, selectors, and control buttons in HA
- remote commands like
trigger_now,pause,resume,force_charge, andset_defaults - real cross-midnight charge and reserve windows, so setups like
22:00 -> 06:00now work properly - MQTT remains opt-in, so existing users can upgrade without changing their current setup
For Home Assistant users, this is the big shift: sbam no longer feels like a black box behind logs.
With MQTT discovery enabled, sbam can appear in Home Assistant with around 20 auto-created entities, including battery capacity, state of charge, forecast, net energy, last decision, next run, charge window state, reserve window state, pause state, and manual control actions.
That means you can now:
- monitor what sbam is doing in real time
- trigger a run on demand
- pause and resume safely
- force charge directly from Home Assistant
- integrate it with dashboards, automations, Node-RED, Grafana, n8n, or any MQTT workflow
If you already use sbam, v2.0.0 makes it much easier to see and control what is happening.
If you are new to sbam, the goal is simple: make Fronius battery charging adapt to tomorrow’s solar conditions instead of relying on a static overnight schedule.
useful links:
GitHub
HA App Add-on docs
MQTT docs
N.B. This post is rarely monitored and it is for announcements only.
For help, bug reports, or feature requests, please use the GitHub issues.
