The inverter showed up a few ago and has been sitting in its box. Before it goes on the equipment wall and gets wired for good, it needed a bench test — mostly because I bought it gray-market, and a gray-market inverter is worth proving genuine before you trust it with a battery bank.
Two jobs, really. Confirm the unit is real and works. And get the configuration software talking to it which was a fun exercise in running a windows only piece of software on my ubuntu laptop.
Victron’s full config tool, VEConfigure, is Windows-only. The shop laptop runs Linux. The clean way through is Bottles — a managed Wine setup — with a 32-bit bottle running the Windows tool inside it. The dongle that bridges the inverter to USB is just an FTDI serial chip under the hood, so Linux picks it up on its own as a serial port; the work is convincing the Windows program inside the bottle to see that port. Map a COM port to the Linux device, add the user to the right group so the port is readable, and it’s there.
Powered the inverter up off a single battery first — fuse in line before anything got switched on, meter on the terminals for voltage and polarity. Green light, no smoke, clean.
Then the software wouldn’t connect. Autodetect kept failing. The fix was to turn autodetect off and pick the port by hand — the emulated serial port doesn’t reliably show up to the auto-scan. Once it was manual, it found the unit right away. It also nagged to update the dongle’s firmware; I said no. You don’t flash hardware through an emulation layer when the thing already works.
That’s the payoff: the tool read the inverter’s own model number and serial straight off the hardware, and both matched the sticker on the case. A fake doesn’t hand you back its own real serial over the bus. Gray-market, but genuine. The live readout showed it inverting clean — correct voltage, correct frequency, DC bus matching my meter, and nothing on the AC input because there was nothing plugged into it.
Read-only session. I didn’t change a single setting. The actual charge configuration is a separate, careful pass once it’s mounted and I’ve got the battery spec sheet in front of me. No reason to fiddle while it’s balanced on a bench.
Next isn’t electrical at all. The corner where all this is going to live isn’t level — the floor’s off — so that gets made true first. Then I build the battery box. Then everything mounts, and the wiring and the config happen against the final install.
The boring order is the right order because this guy doesn’t like surprises.