TL;DR: Running Venus on any Debian system is possible. Without a "chroot" jail or a container. On Intel laptops or servers, a Raspberry Pi, or (almost) whatever.
Disclaimer: yes this is a hack, and in no way endorsed or supported by Victron, or anybody else (other than me) for that matter. It's also preliminary work and probably not yet suited for production use.
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I'd like to introduce:
The Venusian. https://github.com/M-o-a-T/venusian/
This repository contains an installer script (plus some support files) that convince the Venus system to run on a normal Debian system, as the user "venus". No root. No access to the system dbus.
Its programs are managed with "systemd --user". No more daemontools.
A monitor process watches udev directly and starts tasks in parallel; no venus-specific udev rules are necessary (except for adding permissions). Logging and all other debug output goes to the systemd journal.
The Venusian doesn't do serial port probing. (Probing is fragile, takes time, and spams the port with garbage.) Instead, a simple YAML config file tells the udev monitor which unit to start and with which parameters. Modbus-RTU probing still happens, but not with multiple baud rates.
The Venusian also includes support for several Modbus-capable energy meters which basic Venus doesn't recognize.
Cleanly restarting the whole Venus system takes just a few seconds and doesn't require a reboot.
Tested on a Raspberry Pi 3 running Debian (not Raspbian), as well as on Intel, so should work anywhere with a working `qemu-user-arm` binary. Here's a little screenshot from my laptop. It's an Intel Macbook Mini, also running Debian (of course ...). Note the server's network address …
I haven't connected my batteries yet because my controller is somewhat special. That's for next week.
I do plan to use this in production soon(ish).
NB: Running any number of separate Venus instances on the same host should be possible; the only missing piece is a private MQTT server per Venusian user (and a couple of networking rules).
