ELV ALC1800PC Logger

Basic logging software for the ELV Akku-Lade-Center ALC1800PC (maybe same as Ansmann Powerline 5 Pro?)

Motivation

There is no Linux implementation available but I wanted to remotly see the state of charge. Later it would be nice to create some kind of plotting later, like in the original software.

Quickstart

Connect your charger to a Linux Computer (maybe a PiZero -- you can power it by the USB-out ;)). Find out the serial port, if nothing else is connected it most likely is /dev/ttyUSB0.

Start via: ./elvChargerLogger.py /dev/ttyUSB0

Example Output

Slot Program Status Voltage Current ukn ukn Charged-Capacity Discharged-Capacity Energy unk            
                      (mV)    (mA)                (mAh)             (mAh)         (mW)                 
B1   C       F      1473            469     202                                         52             
B2   C       F      1476            503     236                                         55             
B3   C       F      1482            218     217                                         48             
B4   -       -

Run as systemd service

It is not guaranteed that after restart the device will get the same ttyUSBx. Therefore we have to write a udev rule to make it static. Following the very helpful Arch Wiki We find all information about the device via udevadm info --attribute-walk --name=/dev/ttyUSB0

#/etc/udev/rules.d/99-elc-alc1800.rules
KERNEL=="ttyUSB[0-9]*", SUBSYSTEM=="tty", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0403", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6015", SYMLINK+="elv-alc1800"

Don't forget to reload the rules. udevadm control --reload-rules

Put the systemd file to ~/.config/systemd/user/ and you must have enabled Lingering.

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now elv-alc1800@elv-alc1800.service

Notes

You can decompile the original software with ILSpy.