Anyone else using a Raspberry Pi to log their inverter data locally?

Been running a Pi 4 (2GB) for about eight months now logging data from my Victron Multiplus via the VE.Direct interface. Works an absolute treat — pulling everything into InfluxDB and visualising it through Grafana. Took a weekend to get the stack set up properly but it's been rock solid since.

Main reason I went down this route was wanting local data ownership. The VRM portal is fine but I didn't want to depend on cloud access for something as fundamental as knowing what my system is doing. The garden office and EV charging draw some fairly lumpy loads, so being able to correlate those spikes with battery state and solar input has been genuinely useful for optimising when I run things.

A few things I'd flag if you're considering this:

• VE.Direct to USB cable is the easiest way in — Victron's own cable just works
• ve.direct library on PyPI handles the serial parsing nicely
• Set your InfluxDB retention policies sensibly or the SD card fills up fast
• A decent quality SD card (I use Samsung Endurance series) makes a difference for write-heavy workloads

One thing I'm still not entirely happy with is alerting — currently just a basic Python script that pings me if battery SOC drops below a threshold overnight. Has anyone built anything more sophisticated? I had a look at Home Assistant but felt like overkill for what's essentially just a monitoring box.

Also curious whether anyone's managed to pull in data from Fogstar or other BMS units alongside their inverter. Would love a single dashboard showing everything.

@LazyWarden similar setup here at my static caravan, but I went down the Pi Zero 2 W route to keep the power draw ridiculous low — the thing barely registers on my Victron BMV-712 when I check parasitic loads.

One thing worth mentioning that nobody talks about: SD card death. Lost three months of lovely data when mine gave up the ghost last summer. Moved the root filesystem onto a cheap USB SSD and haven't looked back since.

Also running Telegraf as the collector rather than writing custom scripts — handles the VE.Direct serial parsing cleanly and plays nicely with InfluxDB without reinventing the wheel.

The dashboard I've built now tells the story of every cloudy November week better than I ever could — properly satisfying to watch the battery SOC dip and recover across the day.

Been running a Pi Zero 2 W myself on my motorhome setup pulling VE.Direct data, and the sneaky power-saver trick nobody mentions is disabling HDMI output permanently — saves you a cheeky 25mA you'll never miss.

sudo tvservice -o

Add it to /etc/rc.local so it survives reboots. Also worth looking at Victron's Venus OS Large on a Pi if you want the whole ecosystem talking nicely without reinventing the wheel — it plays beautifully with Node-RED for custom automations.

@SparkySparky the Zero 2 W thermal throttling under sustained load is a genuine gotcha in summer though — a small heatsink costs 50p and saves a lot of head-scratching when your logging suddenly goes wonky on a warm August bank holiday.

Running a very similar stack on my van conversion — Pi 4 initially, but I've since moved to a CM4 with a custom carrier board which let me mount it properly in a DIN rail enclosure alongside the Victron kit.

One thing worth adding to what @SparkySparky and @MarineGeoff have covered: if you're pulling VE.Direct data, have a look at vedirect_to_mqtt rather than reading the serial port directly. Feeds cleanly into Node-RED, which then handles the InfluxDB writes. Means you can also trigger automations based on SOC thresholds — my system automatically throttles a 12V fan array when battery drops below 20%.

Also worth logging your shunt data separately from the MPPT if you're running both. Correlating the two over time tells you a lot about your actual consumption patterns versus what you think you're using.

Been doing something similar in my shepherd's hut for the last year or so — Pi 4 pulling data from a Victron MPPT via VE.Direct, shoved into InfluxDB with Grafana on top. Absolutely love being able to check the dashboards remotely.

One thing I'd add that nobody's mentioned — Node-RED sitting in the middle has been a game changer for me. Makes it dead easy to set up alerts (low SOC, high temp, whatever) without writing proper scripts. Just wire up the nodes visually and you're sorted.

Also worth keeping a cheap UPS hat on the Pi so a dodgy power event doesn't corrupt your SD card. Lost one that way early on, moved to an SSD after that and never looked back. @T6Solar — did you stick with SD on the CM4 or go NVMe?