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Introduction

Venus OS is the Victron Energy Unix open source software distribution with a linux kernel. Read the sales pitch for its features. Go to the main readme for building.

There is also a developers mailing list and communicate with other developers and users on Community/Modifications.

Besides there and on this wiki, there is more general Victron information for developers on the Open source page on Victron Live.

Venus OS is the software on our GX Product family.

And we also make it available to install on micro PCs such as:

• RaspberryPi
• Beaglebone Black / Enhanced

For who is this information?

The information here is intended for software developers. Normal Victron end-users, installers, dealers or distributors do not need this information. Its not part of the normal installation and user documentation.

Some examples to explain for who this information is:

0. End-users who want to run Venus OS on a RaspberryPi, not covered by warranty or support.
1. End-users with a software engineering or IT background that want to make their Victron installation do something extra or special.
2. People wanting to add a driver, for example for a particular brand of Generator controller for which we not already have a communication driver.
3. Companies making hardware, using Victron equipment in their product.

Open source / want to contribute?

Some parts of Venus OS are open source, in that case available on our github account. Some parts are not.

Before starting to write code, we recommend to outline what you want to do and why on a post on community, see above link.

Machines

Venus can be built for multiple different hardware. The different machines conf files are in meta-victronenergy/meta-bsp/conf/machine. More info in machines.

Besides building a full images for the machines above, we also build some Debian and Raspbian packages out of the recipes in Venus. See install-venus-packages-on-Debian.

Generic info

• commandline - operational
• commandline - for software development
• root access
• howto add a driver to Venus
• howto add a new machine to venus
• howto install and use the sdk
• release cycle
• watchdog
• data partition
• swupdate project

D-Bus

• dbus-api - the interface specification
• dbus - description of data available on the Venus OS D-Bus

Open embedded version (Rocko), branches and repos

See here: repos and their branches

Color Control GX

• ccgx booting and buttons
• ccgx serial console
• ccgx boot log
• mounting an ubi image
• Introduction to the CCGX Hardware

Venus GX (BeagleBone)

• project bbb page <- includes project status
• bbb hardware spec
• bbb user instructions
• details of the different peripherals:
  • bbb adc
  • bbb gpio
  • bbb canbus
• bbb boot process overview
• bbb boot log
• and many more pages, see pages on the right