Victron Venus OS Shutdown Feature

If you just pull the power cable out of your Raspberry Pi running Victron Venus OS, it can corrupt the SD card and the system won’t start any more. This is how I used to shutdown my Pi in the past and exactly this happened to me. Venus OS got corrupted and would not start any more… I had to re-install and re-configure everything again. What a pain…😑

Many of my viewers have sent me messages and email with possible solutions after the video I made about my experience. Thank you to everyone who contributed. I picked a solution from Daniel* and thanks to his input we have now a proper, easy and clean solution to safely shutdown Venus OS and prevent any corruption on the SD card. The solution below adds a function to the remote console to either shutdown or reboot Venus OS. It also provides the possibility of adding a physical button to shutdown the Raspi. So, one solution for both, soft and hard button. Great, let’s do it!

*So the actual solution is from a guy with the name of kwindrem. He or she has actually programmed the script for Venus OS and made this public on Github. Please follow this link to the Github website if you want to know more about the projects he/she’s working on (plenty of more Venus OS mods to play with).
Direct link to the Shutdown Monitor project on GitHub: https://github.com/kwindrem/ShutdownMonitor

---

As always:
– no programming
– no coding
– simple and easy
– easy to follow procedure

As you know, in Venus OS there is usually just the Reboot button but it completely lacks a proper shutdown function. The steps below will correct this and add this feature to your Venus OS in a clean and professional way.

Things you need:

• Superuser access on Venus OS (I show this in the video below how to enable it)
• IP address of your Raspberry Pi (go to Settings and scroll down to Network or Wifi to find your current assigned IP address). I also show this in the video below where to find it.
• If you work from a Windows computer download and install the free program Putty .
  (This program is not necessary if you work from a Mac or Linux computer, just use the build in console for that task)
• Your computer and Raspberry Pi need to be connected to the same network (LAN or Wifi)
• If you want to add the physical button, here is the pin out diagram to locate the right GPIO pins. Simply connect pin 34 and pin 36 through a push button and enable the function in Venus OS. I show this in the video as well.
• Commands to execute in your console (download in a txt file)
  wget -qO - https://github.com/kwindrem/SetupHelper/archive/current.tar.gz | tar -xzf - -C /data
wget -qO - https://github.com/kwindrem/ShutdownMonitor/archive/current.tar.gz | tar -xzf - -C /data
rm -rf /data/ShutdownMonitor
mv /data/ShutdownMonitor-current /data/ShutdownMonitor
mv /data/SetupHelper-current /data/SetupHelper
/data/ShutdownMonitor/setup

That’s it!

The below video walks you step-by-step through the whole setup process including all preparation. It should be very easy to follow.