Anyone else using a Raspberry Pi to log their battery data, or is that overkill?

Been running a Pi 4 doing exactly this on my motorhome build for about 18 months now. Started as a weekend project and honestly it's become one of the most useful things in the whole system.

I've got it pulling data from my Victron SmartShunt via VE.Direct, pushing everything into InfluxDB, and displaying it through Grafana. Sounds complicated but once it's set up it just sits there quietly doing its job — which is more than I can say for some of the other bits on the van.

The thing that sold me on it was being able to look back at historical data. Had a situation last autumn where my Fogstar Drift cells weren't recovering to full SoC overnight. Pulled up the Grafana graphs and could see exactly when the problem started, which pointed straight to a failing connection on one of my solar inputs. Without the logging I'd have been guessing for weeks.

Is it overkill? Probably on paper. But so is half the stuff we do in this hobby.

The Pi does run 24/7 which does add a small parasitic draw — mine pulls around 2.5W — so worth factoring in if you're on a tight budget. I use a quality SD card and run the OS from a USB drive to avoid card corruption issues.

Curious whether anyone's doing anything similar with a Pi Zero to cut that draw down, or whether others have gone down the Cerbo GX route instead and just accepted paying the Victron premium for a more polished experience.

@VickyFisher definitely not overkill in my experience! I've been doing something similar on my narrowboat for about two years now using a Pi Zero 2 W - massively cheaper than the Pi 4 and honestly plenty capable for data logging if you're not doing anything too intensive.

One thing I'd add that's been genuinely useful - I pipe everything into InfluxDB with Grafana dashboards on top, so I can spot trends over weeks and months rather than just checking instantaneous readings. Really helped me identify that my battery bank was consistently undercharging during overcast November/December periods before it became a serious problem.

Are you logging via a Victron BMS or something else? The Victron VE.Direct protocol is surprisingly straightforward to work with if you haven't already gone down that route.

@BoatMatt snap on the narrowboat setup — mine's been running so long the Pi knows my battery health better than I know my own cholesterol levels.

@VickyFisher great to see this thread — been running a Pi 3B+ on my motorhome for nearly two years now, logging data from a Victron SmartShunt via the VE.Direct interface into InfluxDB with Grafana dashboards.

The bit that really changed things for me was adding historical trend analysis — after six months of data I could actually see my Fogstar lithium cells developing a slight capacity imbalance before it became a real problem. Caught it early, rebalanced, sorted.

One thing worth flagging for anyone starting out: power consumption of the Pi itself matters when you're off-grid. I've got mine configured to drop into a low-power mode overnight. Saves a meaningful amount over a week of boondocking.

@BoatMatt curious whether you're pulling data over VE.Direct or Bluetooth — I found wired far more reliable for continuous logging.

Great thread @VickyFisher! I've been running a similar setup on my off-grid cabin for about eight months now. One thing I'd add that nobody's mentioned yet — I've found pairing the Pi with a proper UPS hat (I'm using the Waveshare one) absolutely essential. Lost a couple of weeks of data early on when the battery voltage dipped unexpectedly and the Pi didn't shut down gracefully. Corrupted the SD card completely.

Also worth considering an industrial-grade SD card or better yet booting from a small SSD over USB — the constant write cycles from logging will eventually kill a standard card. I'm using InfluxDB with Grafana for the dashboards and it's brilliant for spotting trends over time. Seeing summer vs winter battery behaviour side by side has genuinely changed how I manage my system.