disable-victron-bluetooth

Disable Victron's built-in BLE services on Venus OS to prevent them from interfering with third-party Bluetooth services.

Why

Two stock Venus OS services cause serious problems for any third-party BLE service:

Service	Problem
dbus-ble-sensors	Uses raw HCI sockets to scan, bypassing BlueZ entirely. This corrupts BlueZ's internal discovery state, causing org.bluez.Error.InProgress for any other service using the D-Bus API — even when Discovering is False. The corruption is continuous (re-applied every 10 seconds) and the only recovery is an adapter power-cycle or bluetoothd restart, both of which drop all BLE connections.
vesmart-server	Forcibly disconnects all BLE devices every ~60 seconds and runs its own scan cycle, causing further InProgress collisions and connection drops.

Upstream issues:

• victronenergy/venus#1587 — vesmart forcibly disconnects all BLE devices
• victronenergy/venus#1597 — dbus-ble-sensors raw HCI scanning corrupts BlueZ discovery state

What it does

1. Saves current D-Bus settings (/Settings/Services/BleSensors and /Settings/Services/Bluetooth) to /data/disable-victron-bluetooth.state
2. Disables both services in the Venus OS UI via D-Bus (sets to 0)
3. Stops each service if running (svc -d)
4. Makes run/start scripts non-executable so they can't be restarted by daemontools or the bt-config udev hotplug script

--restore reverses all of this: re-enables the scripts, starts the services, and restores the D-Bus settings to their original values (read from the saved state file, not hardcoded).

The root partition is read-only on Venus OS — the script temporarily remounts it read-write, modifies the scripts, and restores read-only. All steps are idempotent — safe to run repeatedly.

Quick start

Run directly on the Cerbo without downloading:

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TechBlueprints/disable-victron-bluetooth/main/disable-victron-bluetooth.sh | sh

To restore:

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TechBlueprints/disable-victron-bluetooth/main/disable-victron-bluetooth.sh | sh -s -- --restore

Or copy a file to the Cerbo and run it:

# Bash version
scp disable-victron-bluetooth.sh root@cerbo:/tmp/
ssh root@cerbo 'sh /tmp/disable-victron-bluetooth.sh'

# Python version
scp disable-victron-bluetooth.py root@cerbo:/tmp/
ssh root@cerbo 'python3 /tmp/disable-victron-bluetooth.py'

To re-enable both services:

sh disable-victron-bluetooth.sh --restore
# or
python3 disable-victron-bluetooth.py --restore

Include in your project

Both scripts are designed to be easy to embed. Each file contains the full Apache 2.0 license header so it can be used standalone.

Bash — source and call

. /path/to/disable-victron-bluetooth.sh
disable_victron_ble          # disable both services
restore_victron_ble          # re-enable both services
disable_service dbus-ble-sensors  # disable just one

Python — import and call

from disable_victron_bluetooth import disable_victron_ble, restore_victron_ble

disable_victron_ble()        # disable both services
restore_victron_ble()        # re-enable both services

Or call individual services:

from disable_victron_bluetooth import disable_service, restore_service

disable_service("dbus-ble-sensors")
restore_service("vesmart-server")

Note on firmware updates

Venus OS firmware updates restore the read-only root partition, which re-enables these services. You should call disable_victron_ble on boot (e.g., from /data/rc.local or from your service's install script) to keep them disabled after updates.

See Venus OS: Root Access for full details on customizing a GX device, boot hooks, the read-only rootfs, and creating persistent patches.

Development

A non-production Cerbo GX (einstein) is available for testing at root@dev-cerbo. Use this for rapid iteration when physical device access isn't needed — it runs the same Venus OS and service stack as production units but can be freely modified without risk.

ssh root@dev-cerbo

The production Cerbo (root@cerbo) should only be used for final validation.

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE.