Anyone else using a Raspberry Pi to log their battery data, or is there a simpler way?

Been running a Pi Zero W hooked up to my Victron kit via VE.Direct for about two years now and honestly it's been rock solid — once you've got Venus OS Large on there it basically runs itself and spits everything into VRM like a dream.

The setup in my van feeds the data straight to my phone, so I can see exactly how much juice I've got left before I do something daft like trying to charge the EV off a half-flat LiFePO4 bank (yes, that was a Tuesday).

That said, if you're after something simpler, a few options worth considering:

• Victron Cerbo GX — plug and play but costs actual money
• Grafana + InfluxDB on the Pi if you want pretty graphs and something to stare at while questioning your life choices
• Shelly EM for basic monitoring without the faff, dead cheap
• Fogstar cells with a decent BMS that has Bluetooth — the app does the job for casual use

The Pi route is brilliant if you're a tinkerer, but I'll be honest, getting the VE.Direct USB cable to behave under a dodgy 12V USB converter in a moving van nearly broke me spiritually.

For the cabin crowd where everything's static, Pi + Venus OS is genuinely unbeatable value — especially if you've already got a Pi gathering dust from that sourdough-lockdown-project phase we all went through.

What's everyone else running? Curious whether anyone's gone full Home Assistant integration — I've been tempted but I've got about 47 unfinished projects already so perhaps not.

@VoltMax — been doing something similar on my narrowboat for the past 18 months, Pi 4 running Venus OS pulling data from a SmartShunt via VE.Direct. Completely agree it's rock solid once configured.

One thing worth adding for anyone considering it: the official Victron GX Touch route is considerably simpler if you're not fussed about custom dashboards, but you'll pay a significant premium for that convenience.

For the technically curious, the real advantage of the Pi approach is pushing data into InfluxDB + Grafana — you get historical SoC trends, charge cycle counts, temperature correlations etc. that the standard Victron app simply doesn't expose cleanly.

The gotcha on boats specifically is condensation killing SD cards. Industrial-grade cards (Samsung Pro Endurance series) and a decent waterproof enclosure sorted that for me after one expensive lesson.

Been running Venus OS on a Pi 3B+ for about a year and yeah, it's solid as a rock — apart from the one time I forgot to properly shut it down before a grid outage and it corrupted the SD card. Ironic, given the whole point of my setup is emergency backup. 🙃

Lesson learned: slap a decent

Great thread this. I've gone a slightly different route — rather than Venus OS I'm running a bare Raspbian install with Node-RED pulling data from my Victron via VE.Direct to USB, then pushing everything into InfluxDB and displaying it on Grafana dashboards. Bit more fiddly to set up initially but the flexibility is brilliant once it's all talking properly. You can set up custom alerts, long-term trend analysis, the lot.

One tip if anyone's worried about SD card wear from all the constant writes — move your InfluxDB storage to a small USB stick or an SSD hung off the Pi. Had a card die on me after about eight months doing it the original way. Lesson learned the hard way!

@CotswoldNomad curious what you forgot that caused the issue — sounds like there's a story there! 😄

@Davo22 that's interesting — I went down the bare Raspbian route first too, ended up with a sprawling mess of Python scripts held together with cron jobs and good intentions.

Eventually caved and flashed Venus OS Large on a Pi 4 and haven't looked back. The killer feature for me is the MQTT broker built right in — I'm pulling live state-of-charge data straight into Home Assistant to manage my EV charging schedule off the boat's 200Ah Fogstar lithium bank. When the batteries dip below 60% the charger just backs off automatically.

No manual fiddling, no 2am panics wondering if I've left the car drawing too hard overnight.

The VRM portal logging is just a bonus on top — three months of data with zero effort. Sometimes the "simpler way" really is the way everyone else already went.