Nice BMS (Batrium or other high end) without Windows PC

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vossman77

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I do not have any windows machines, it is possible to run your system from a Linux or Raspberry Pi (preferred) based setup? Or I guess I could run the batrium software from inside a virtual machine running windows. I do not like the idea of running a full-blown windows (energy-hog) machine for this purpose.

Batrium has a lot of great reviews, so I am interested in what @daromer is working with his raspberry pi.

It would be great to just have it setup like a web server on a raspberry pi that one could access from any web browser.

I do not like windows, because the whole monopoly thing in the 2000s from Microsoft left a bad taste in my mouth, but more importantly. I love the command line and using the bash shell. IMHO windows power shell is just crap.
 
vossman77 said:
I do not like windows, because the whole monopoly thing in the 2000s from Microsoft left a bad taste in my mouth,
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You sure hold a grudge. :D
 
vossman77 said:
I do not have any windows machines, it is possible to run your system from a Linux or Raspberry Pi (preferred) based setup? Or I guess I could run the batrium software from inside a virtual machine running windows. I do not like the idea of running a full-blown windows (energy-hog) machine for this purpose.

Batrium has a lot of great reviews, so I am interested in what @daromer is working with his raspberry pi.

It would be great to just have it setup like a web server on a raspberry pi that one could access from any web browser.

I do not like windows, because the whole monopoly thing in the 2000s from Microsoft left a bad taste in my mouth, but more importantly. I love the command line and using the bash shell. IMHO windows power shell is just crap.
Click to expand...

Windows rocks ;) :p

Just to even things out a bit...well notwindows 10 but yea
 
Many cheap BMSes use an android app to set various items.

later floyd
 
Batrium currently won't run via Wine as it utilizes the .Net programming. You'd have to do a VM setup with Windows to run it. But, then you'd need to have the VM running all the time. I suppose that'd be ok if it was running on your server and you remote desktop to it to work with it.
 
Korishan said:
Batrium currently won't run via Wine as it utilizes the .Net programming. You'd have to do a VM setup with Windows to run it. But, then you'd need to have the VM running all the time. I suppose that'd be ok if it was running on your server and you remote desktop to it to work with it.
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That's not a bad idea. You can strip a Windows install down pretty small. A copy of Windows 7 embedded might suit. Its tiny. Don't know how you will go with .NET and other dependencies.
 
You dont need windows to run batrium.. only during initial setup!
 
Oh yeah! Daromer has built an ISO for the raspberry pi that uses grafana and what ever else to make his custom graphs and such. Altho, can you configure the Batrium through your interface as well?
 
You cannot configure through my interface no. its read only. As I said you currently need a windows based machine to do initial configuration.
 
vossman77 said:
I do not like windows, because the whole monopoly thing in the 2000s from Microsoft left a bad taste in my mouth, but more importantly. I love the command line and using the bash shell. IMHO windows power shell is just crap.
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I'm sorry but that's ridiculous. You can pick up one of those small "minipc" on ebay for cheap and just use that dedicated for the Batrium. That's what I'm doing. You don't need an entire workstation and to pledge full allegiance to Windows. You don't need the command line to manage Batrium, so that point is relevant as well.
 
mike said:
I'm sorry but that's ridiculous. You can pick up one of those small "minipc" on ebay for cheap and just use that dedicated for the Batrium. That's what I'm doing. You don't need an entire workstation and to pledge full allegiance to Windows. You don't need the command line to manage Batrium, so that point is relevant as well.
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I do not want to argue, but I disagree. IMHO a command line interface is always better than any GUI software. If you are just displaying data why not just use a web interface. I have been using Linux for over 20 years and I find windows is so clunky and the automatic software updates the reboot the computer all the time. I have a miniPC, but it running Linux, so I would have to buy another.

I guess I will look into virtual machine (VM) idea, I could snapshot it and only load it when needed.

daromer said:
You cannot configure through my interface no. its read only. As I said you currently need a windows based machine to do initial configuration.
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@daromer, I saw your video on the grafana system and it is good to know the details. Sounds like a plausible solution.

Is there a batrium API that could be tapped into, so we could improve your program. I am long-time python developer (unfortunately with very little free time). I have some experience using python comtypes to control windows programs (https://pythonhosted.org/comtypes/) though it is always very clunky. I guess one would still have to have a windows machine running in order to bring in comtypes, but it could interface with a VM on the same machine. It looks like there may be docker support for windows containers (https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/windowsservercore/ ) which could deal with it. I dunno sounds like a lot of work and I could just build my own BMS at that point.

Actually there are some libraries that can run .NET programs on linux, so I may look into that and see if I can get it up and running on CentOS (RHEL) before buying.

https://opensource.com/article/17/11/net-linux
 
I guess you havent looked at the stuff i did? If so you would have found the software and the open sourced protocol ;)
https://github.com/Batrium/WatchMonUdpListener
and
http://diytechandrepairs.nu/raspberry-solar/

Software above was something i just wrote together so people could get an idea on how simple you can get the data out.

This is not .net core though. I spent an hour or 3 on Wine and getting it to work but to much hassle when it takes 20min to boot up a VM with Windows on it for configuring. Yes Im a Linux guy since 20++ years and still have no issues using Windows for those tasks.
 
daromer said:
I guess you havent looked at the stuff i did? If so you would have found the software and the open sourced protocol ;)
https://github.com/Batrium/WatchMonUdpListener
and
http://diytechandrepairs.nu/raspberry-solar/

Software above was something i just wrote together so people could get an idea on how simple you can get the data out.

This is not .net core though. I spent an hour or 3 on Wine and getting it to work but to much hassle when it takes 20min to boot up a VM with Windows on it for configuring. Yes Im a Linux guy since 20++ years and still have no issues using Windows for those tasks.
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Thanks @daromer. I watched your video showing the display, but I did not dig into the code or how it works in detail. It looks like you have done the majority of what I wanted it to do.

I just don't have a ton of experience with a BMS, so I was not sure how often a person needs to change the configuration via windows, etc. and I wanted to be knowledgeable before I spend the money on Batrium. Windows is just not a system I am familiar with.
 
daromer said:
You cannot configure through my interface no. its read only. As I said you currently need a windows based machine to do initial configuration.
Click to expand...

I feel a feature request comming :)
 
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