Great Product, Thanks FL4P for your contribution to the diy community!

[kmoreau893]

I had some issues with my initial use of Batmon, as it never seemed to discover any devices or it didn't indicate that anything was working and there were a lot of error messages and exceptions coming from the log which seemed that things weren't working. Since this was my first use of Home Assistant, and it was using an Apple Intel MacBook running VMWare and a Home Assistant image, there were a lot of moving parts to troubleshoot.

First was that it seems that Home Assistant doesn't work at all with the built-in Bluetooth implementation of the MacBook. I first set up the HA VM and it never connected to HCI0. I did some research and found that only external USB bluetooth adapters would work, so I purchased a few from Amazon. Again I just did the shotgun approach as those 'approved' adapters were not readily available. After receiving and adding the adapters, it seemed that discovery of bluetooth devices started working and I saw my BMSs in the list discovery list, but it seemed that Batman was always timing out and throwing exceptions and sometimes restarting. I never saw any Batmon entities in HA, nor was I sure what I would see or how to use them as a HA newbie.

After attempting to troubleshoot with little success learning about MQTT (which maybe was the source of the problem) I decided to uninstall MQTT and Batmon. I reinstalled them both and magically things started working and tons of BMS sensors began to appear in Home Assistant. Anyway after some minor tweaking of BMS MAC address typos in Batmon, I seem to have a stable implementation working with my Overkill BMSs. I still need to tweak the bluetooth adapter location and see if using multiple adapters simultaneously will enhance the reliability and lower the latency but Batmon is doing what I want. I'll update this discussion as I find out more to pay it forward.

Again, thanks FL4P for all your work here. Regards, Keith