How do I direct Venus OS to probe a particular serial port?

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Mack Allison asked Jan 27, '20

How do I direct Venus OS to probe a particular serial port?

Where can I configure which serial ports (by name) will be probed by Venus? I need to listen to a BlueSolar MPPT charger over IP serial. I have all of the relevant steps completed leading up to it. I can

read from the VE.Direct TTL pins, via a logic converter,
pick it up in a serial <-> ethernet converter
watch the console output on putty or minicom
read it properly from the Windows application after autodetection.

So the question becomes, how do I direct venus OS to probe a particular serial port and look for it?

Raspberry Pi

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Answer 1 · 2020-01-27T18:07:26Z

mvader (Victron Energy) answered · Jan 27, 2020 at 06:07 PM

Hi Mack, that will involve some code reading & experimenting :o).

what you need to look into is the serial-starter (search the rootfs) and udev (search the internet to understand it generically, and search rootfs to see how we use it).

Or, to skip the auto-scanning, start the vedirect-interface driver manually on that port.

Make sure to search our venus wiki on gothub for “serial”.

Success & enjoy, Matthijs

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mvader (Victron Energy) ♦♦ commented · Jan 27, 2020 at 06:10 PM

Ps, reading through these 45 commits will also help in udev understanding

https://github.com/victronenergy/meta-victronenergy/search?q=udev&type=Commits

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Mack Allison commented · Jan 28, 2020 at 03:33 PM

Thanks, mvader, that helped point me in the right direction. Ultimately it was a relatively straightforward application of this: https://github.com/victronenergy/venus/wiki/install-venus-packages-on-Debian, if that helps another who stumbles on this post.

I will add that the script:/data/services/vedirect00/run

must give an explicit --dbus-instance

#!/bin/sh
exec 2>&1
exec /opt/victronenergy/vedirect-interface/vedirect-dbus -v --log-before 25 --log-after 25 -t30 --banner -s /dev/ttyV0 --dbus-instance 233

In my case /dev/ttyV0 is a tcp serial port being created by socat and the instance 233 was chosen at random to deal with this error in

/var/log/vedirect00/run/current

failed to determine a unique number, see --dbus-instance

I'm certain now it could be just as easily implemented in VenusOS but it was easier with all the tools.

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mvader (Victron Energy) ♦♦ Mack Allison commented · Jan 28, 2020 at 10:17 PM

nice! .

.

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Mack Allison mvader (Victron Energy) ♦♦ commented · Jan 28, 2020 at 10:46 PM

I have hit a snag when adapting back to the Venus pi release instead of packages on raspian. where you indicate to link

ln -s /data/services/vedirect00 /etc/service/vedirect00

that directory does not exist and creating it does not get the result. Is there somewhere else I need to link my vedirect00 directory to start it on Venus?

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mvader (Victron Energy) ♦♦ Mack Allison commented · Jan 29, 2020 at 05:35 AM

Hi, Check with ps where svscan is looking for services.

And you could google on svscan or daemontools to learn more

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Mack Allison mvader (Victron Energy) ♦♦ commented · Jan 29, 2020 at 03:29 PM

Thanks for the tip. That took me in the right direction. It's working now and svscan is managing my socat processes as well

For others; TLDR

/service in Venus

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Answer 2 · 2020-01-31T04:01:53Z

fantail answered · Jan 31, 2020 at 04:01 AM

If the USB adapter uses an FTDI chip then it has a unique serial number that you can use to identify the adapter and then locate its port ID. bad news is that this port ID can change between boots.

--- in terminal/putty

enter :: ls -l /dev/serial/by-id

for a list of the attached devices and their assigned IDs

You will also need to change GX serial-starter.rules file to stop victron tasks polling this port. This can cause corruption on link

The most of the above also applys on most unix systems

fantail

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