Hi everyone,
I’m trying to get my Victron MultiPlus (connected through a Cerbo GX-like device running Venus OS, IP 192.168.1.175) integrated with Home Assistant via MQTT. I’ve been debugging this for hours and I’m stuck at the moment.
What works:
MQTT on LAN (plaintext) is enabled on the GX, port 1883 is open and reachable.
Locally on the GX itself everything works perfectly.
First start listening:
mosquitto_sub -h 127.0.0.1 -t “N/#” -v
Then send the keepalive in a second window:
mosquitto_pub -h 127.0.0.1 -t “R/my-portal-id/keepalive” -n
Immediately after that I get a full dump of all N/ topics om the first -v window (battery SOC, voltage, power, vebus mode, etc.).
Mosquitto broker add-on is running in HA.
I’ve tried a bridge with victron.conf in /share/mosquitto (multiple variations), for example:
connection victron
address 192.168.1.175:1883
topic N/# in 0 victron/
topic R/# out 0 victron/
topic W/# out 0 victron/
(also tried both, QoS 2, prefix victron/ victron/, etc.)
What doesn’t work:
In HA (Developer Tools > MQTT or MQTT Explorer connected to HA broker) I only see the Serial topic (victron/N/…/system/0/Serial).
Keepalive automation (topic victron/R/my-portal-id/keepalive, empty payload) is sent, but it doesn’t trigger any response on the GX (no N/ topics visible in PuTTY on the GX).
Manual publish from HA does the same: nothing happens on the GX.
Installed a Victron MQTT integration via HACS, but it creates no entities (probably because no data is coming in).
I’ve tried everything: bridge on/off, authentication off, restarts, different prefix/QoS combinations, etc.
This is very complicated!!! I gave up. Any ideas what I’m missing?
Is the bridge config wrong? Should I use direct connection instead? Something with retained messages or keepalive handling?
Thanks in advance!,
Erik
Versions:
Home Assistant 2025.11.2 (HA OS)
Venus OS v3.67