Anyone else using a Raspberry Pi to log their battery data locally instead of cloud?

Been running a Pi 4 with Venus OS on it for about 18 months now and honestly it's the best thing I've done for the shepherd's hut setup — all my Victron data logged locally to InfluxDB, visualised in Grafana, and not a single byte leaving my network unless I want it to.

The VRM portal is great don't get me wrong, but there's something deeply satisfying about owning your own data, especially when you're on a patchy rural connection anyway. Mine's wired into a little POE switch so it's not even stealing power from the Fogstar battery stack.

Current dashboard shows:

• SOC over rolling 30 days
• Charge/discharge cycles
• Solar yield vs. consumption (the garden office is a hungry beast)
• EV charging sessions mapped against grid-tie export

Setup took a weekend and approximately four cups of tea and one mild swear word when I got the MQTT broker wrong the first time.

Anyone else gone down this rabbit hole? Curious whether people are pulling data from non-Victron kit too — I've been eyeing up adding a Renogy rover to the mix but not sure if the Modbus integration is worth the faff.

@DalesOffGrid great setup — been doing something similar on the Vivaro for about two years now.

One thing worth adding to your stack: Telegraf as the collection agent between Venus OS and InfluxDB. It handles the MQTT feed from Venus cleanly and gives you proper field-level tagging, which makes Grafana queries far less painful when you're hunting down why your Fogstar lithium took longer to absorb on a particular cloudy Tuesday.

Also worth enabling the VRM local logging fallback in Venus OS settings — if your Pi ever hiccups, data still buffers on the CCGX/Cerbo rather than leaving gaps in your historical records.

For anyone considering this route on a motorhome/vehicle install, power the Pi from a fused 5V buck converter off your 12V bus rather than a wall adapter. Far more resilient when you're bouncing down a B-road.

Been running almost identical on my cabin setup for about eight months. One thing I'd add that nobody's mentioned yet — give Telegraf a look for getting data from your Victron into InfluxDB, it handles the MQTT side cleanly without you having to bodge together custom scripts.

Only real gripe is when Venus OS updates occasionally break something minor and you spend an evening working out why your dashboards have gone blank. Not a dealbreaker, just annoying.

@DalesOffGrid what retention policy are you running on your InfluxDB? I've got mine set to keep full resolution data for 30 days then downsample after that — wondering if others have found a better balance for long-term trend analysis without the database ballooning.

Running this exact setup in my shepherd's hut and the moment you see your Fogstar batteries plotted over a full winter you'll never trust a cloud dashboard again — local data is proper data.

Great thread — been running a similar Pi-based setup in my motorhome for just over a year now, and one thing I'd add that complements the InfluxDB logging nicely is setting up Grafana alerts to push notifications to your phone when SoC drops below a threshold overnight. Saved me a few times when the solar wasn't harvesting what I expected.

Also worth mentioning — if you're pulling data directly from Victron kit via VE.Direct to USB, the vedirect-to-mqtt bridge is rock solid and plays beautifully with a local Mosquitto broker before it hits InfluxDB. Keeps the whole chain local with zero cloud dependency.

@BatteryPaula — curious whether you're logging cell-level data from the Fogstars or just pack-level voltage/current? The BMS data over UART can be really revealing across a full winter cycle.

Really interesting thread — been meaning to do something similar on my motorhome for a while and this is the nudge I needed.

Quick question for @ExFirefighter42 and @DalesOffGrid: how are you handling power to the Pi itself when the system voltage drops low overnight? I'm slightly worried about the Pi brown-browning out mid-write and corrupting the SD card — or have you moved to SSDs?

I've seen people recommend:

• Read-only root filesystem on the Pi
• Using a small UPS HAT (like the Pisugar) as a buffer
• Switching entirely to an SSD over USB

Is there a consensus on which approach is most robust for a mobile/motorhome install specifically? The vibration side of things concerns me too — an SD card feels fragile long-term on the road.