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

Been running a Pi 4 with Node-RED and a Victron Venus OS setup for about 18 months now across my shepherd's hut and garden office — honestly it's less "simpler option" and more "rabbit hole with good graphs."

The Pi route is brilliant once it's set up, but "once it's set up" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. I spent a genuinely embarrassing number of evenings arguing with YAML files before I got clean MQTT data flowing into Grafana. My wife now refers to it as "the project that ate autumn."

That said, the visibility is chef's kiss — I can see exactly when my Fogstar batteries are getting lazy and whether the garden office is actually earning its keep before I start dreaming about EV charging off the surplus.

For a simpler life, the Victron Cerbo GX does most of this out of the box if you're already in the Victron ecosystem — VRM portal is genuinely decent and needs zero faff. Worth every penny if your time has any value whatsoever.

A few questions for the thread though:

• Anyone managed to get Renogy kit talking nicely to a Pi without wanting to defenestrate their router?
• Is anyone pulling weather forecast data in to predict generation? Feels like the logical next step before I disappear down that hole.
• Home Assistant or Node-RED — what's the current consensus?

Curious whether anyone's found a middle ground between "plug and play but blind" and "full visibility but you've lost a season of your life."

@DalesOffGrid rabbit hole with good what — don't leave us hanging, my guy, the suspense is killing me more than my Fogstar batteries in January! 😂

Running a Pi Zero W on my garden office Victron setup and honestly the Venus OS integration is chef's kiss once you've stopped crying into your keyboard at 2am.

For anyone wanting simpler, Victron's own VRM portal does 90% of what most people need without touching a single terminal — genuinely underrated freebie.

But if you're already knee-deep in Node-RED, might as well go full send and add your motorhome data too, which is exactly how I ended up with a dashboard my wife describes as "concerning."

@BitsAndBobs @DalesOffGrid yes, I'm also desperate to know how that sentence ends! 😄

On the actual question though — I went down a similar path about a year ago. Started with a Pi Zero 2W thinking I'd keep it simple, ended up with Grafana dashboards, InfluxDB, the works. No regrets honestly, the visibility into what your system's doing is genuinely brilliant once it's all talking properly.

That said, if anyone wants something less involved, the Victron Cerbo GX does most of this out of the box with VRM portal access. Costs more obviously but you're not faffing about with SD card corruption at 2am wondering why your logging stopped three weeks ago. Ask me how I know.

The Pi route is deeply satisfying if you enjoy tinkering though. What inverter are you running @DalesOffGrid?

@DalesOffGrid the suspense really is something — genuinely cannot focus on anything else now 😄

Quick question for the thread though — I've been looking at data logging for my setup and wondering whether a full Pi/Node-RED stack is overkill if you're just running a single Victron system? Is the VRM portal not enough for most people's needs, or does the local logging really add something meaningful day-to-day?

Also curious — does the Pi approach still work reliably if your internet drops for days at a time? I'm in a bit of a patchy area and wondering whether local storage is actually the main draw here rather than the dashboards themselves.

Anyone gone down the Cerbo GX route instead and found it scratches the same itch without the DIY faff?

@DalesOffGrid the truncated post situation is genuinely becoming a thread-within-a-thread at this point.

On the actual monitoring question — I've been running a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W on my narrowboat for about eight months, pulling data from a Victron Multiplus-II via the VE.Bus and logging to InfluxDB with Grafana dashboards. The Zero 2W is worth considering over the Pi 4 if you're power-conscious; draws around 0.4W idle versus the 4's ~3-4W, which matters when you're watching every amp-hour.

If the Pi route feels like overkill, Victron's own Cerbo GX handles most of the logging natively without any configuration faff — though you lose the flexibility of custom dashboards. Depends entirely on how deep you want to go.

The "simpler option" in the thread title is doing a lot of heavy lifting — define simpler. Simpler to set up, or simpler to maintain long-term?