VE Direct Interface unreliable dies with error

[acoleman-apc]

From the log:

2020-06-23 03:21:27,792 DEBUG VEDirect Starting Serial read
2020-06-23 03:21:27,812 ERROR VEDirect 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xa5 in position 0: invalid start byte

[acoleman-apc]

This code seems to be the fix:
byte = self._ser.read(1)
byte = byte.decode(encoding = 'unicode_escape')

            if byte:
                packet = self.input(byte)
                if packet is not None:
                    self._rx_buf = packet

[acoleman-apc]

Working log output from the updated code above:

2020-06-23 23:00:36,927 DEBUG VEDirect Starting Serial read from VEDirect . . .
2020-06-23 23:00:37,036 DEBUG VEDirect 203 NEW FRAME : {'V': '12998', 'VS': '30', 'I': '-581', 'P': '-8', 'CE': '-1146', 'SOC': '999', 'TTG': '14400', 'Alarm': 0, 'Relay': 0, 'AR': '0', 'BMV': '712 Smart', 'FW': '0403', 'H1': '-234233', 'H2': '-1146', 'H3': '0', 'H4': '0', 'H5': '0', 'H6': '-3295204', 'H7': '11921', 'H8': '20368', 'H9': '2012', 'H10': '10', 'H11': '0', 'H12': '0', 'H15': '22', 'H16': '21014', 'H17': '4105', 'H18': '4364', 'H\x0016': '21014', 'PID': '0xA381'}
2020-06-23 23:00:37,037 DEBUG VEDirect 203 Timestamp : 1592949637.036505
2020-06-23 23:00:37,038 DEBUG VEDirect 203 From Node : 27
2020-06-23 23:00:37,038 DEBUG VEDirect 203 Values : [99.9, -1146, 14400, 12.998000000000001, -581, 0, 0]
2020-06-23 23:00:37,038 DEBUG VEDirect 203 Sent to channel(start)' : ToEmonCMS
2020-06-23 23:00:37,039 DEBUG VEDirect 203 Sent to channel(end)' : ToEmonCMS

[acoleman-apc]

On the 712, the interface simply isn't reliable. See this image of missing data:

I'll donate 50$ (via PayPal) to anyone who can fix this and get my 712 reliably sending data to emon pi.