This is a horrible, hacky, proof of concept mess for Pi VU Meter on Volumio It details steps with the old phatmeter library, but should work with PiVuMeter too, simply change "ameter" to "pivumeter" and link the right lib accordingly
REQUIRED: Create /etc/udev/rules.d/60-i2c.rules
with the contents:
KEREL=="i2c-1", GROUP="i2C", MODE="0777"