That’s by design really. But you should be able to install the missing compilers, build tools, and headers.
It might be possible they don’t support ARM. That’d be odd though but who knows. If these are really old maybe they were built before RPis and their ilk became popular. Moxa support should be able to help with that.
I don’t read it like that. I think all the suggestions are to not try to do the hardest thing you can do with OH as the first integration you attempt. OH is big, it’s complicated, and it requires a steep learning curve. So the suggestion is to find something simpler and easier, perhaps even something that doesn’t require any hardware (e.g. one of the weather bindings, Astro, etc.) first to get some experience with openHAB under your belt.
Only once you are a little bit comfortable with OH pursue RS232 , RS485, and Modbus type integrations. Those are going to be hard no matter what and trying to pursue that at the same time as learning OH concepts and how they all work is going to make it exponentially more challenging to reach your end goal.
And as you learn how OH works and other options you may have available for integration, you may find alternative approaches might be better than marching down the direct integration between OH and the RSXXX interfaces directly. But maybe not and that’s OK too.
OrangePi, BananaPi, Pine64 and I’m sure many other SBC makers might be alternatives while RPis continue to have their supply chain issues.
Or perhaps you can get started on some of these with an old laptop/desktop sitting in the closet doing nothing or on your main computers in a VM or the like. One of the great things about OH being a Java program is it’ll run just about anywhere that has sufficient resources.
From an OH perspective:
- take advantage of automatic discovery of Things where possible
- use names for Items that have meaning to the users of your home automation (“LivingRoom_Lamp” is a much better Item name than “ZwaveNode002Fibaro0234WallSwitch_Switch1”).
- in the UI take advantage of documentation fields: location, name, description
- in text configs take advantage of comments
- where feasible, install and configure stuff from the marketplace instead of coding things yourself
- use source control (yes, source control can be done even for managed configurations done through the UI) to track your history of changes
Beyond the OH perspective, look into one of the many “infrastructure as code” options. I know this is throwing new things to learn on top of new things to learn but it’s amazing how freeing these can be. I run all sorts of services: Plex, Nextcloud, Mosquitto, Zabbix, Librephotos, Vaultwarden, etc. I couldn’t tell you how I installed and configured any of them from memory. But because I use Ansible, I don’t need to. It’s all there in my playbooks. And what makes it even more wonderful is that if I need to do it again, I still don’t need to remember how to do it from memory. I just need run the playbooks again.