Victron Energy VE.Direct hackish

I have been increasingly pleased by Solar energy components from Victron Energy. Most of their products have a "VE.Direct" port which is just 5V UART serial at 19200 8N1 (a few older battery module units are 3.3V). If you ask nicely and register at their site they will give you pretty thorough technical documentation of the protocol over that serial port. I've been using this python module for parsing VE.Direct serial port broadcast (status update just sends once a second, this may be all the data you need for many uses).

They have an official $30 VE.Direct USB serial adapter that plugs in to their equipment and Just Works. But I work with embedded stuff to know that those are some pretty cheap commodity parts potentially. So I set up with this USB to UART TTL (5v or 3.3V) module that's $10 for a 5 pack and this JST 2.0 PH cable, and for $3 and some soldering I have my hackish VE.Direct adapter cable. Worked the first time!