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

Been running a Pi 4 doing exactly this on my narrowboat for about 18 months — connecting to a Victron Multiplus via VE.Direct USB cable, feeding into InfluxDB, and displaying it all through Grafana, and honestly it's the best thing I've done to the system since fitting the Fogstar batteries.

The dashboard shows me SOC, charge/discharge rates, mains input status, and I've got alerts set up so my phone pings me if the battery drops below 20% while I'm off the boat — incredibly useful when you're moored somewhere sketchy and leave the fridge running.

A few things worth mentioning if you're going down this route:

• Use a decent SD card — a cheapo one will die from all the database writes within months. I use a Samsung Endurance series.
• Or better yet, run InfluxDB off a small USB SSD instead of the SD card entirely. Future-you will be grateful.
• VictronConnect is fine for a quick check but Grafana graphs are proper satisfying to look at.
• The venus-data.py community scripts are a decent starting point if you don't fancy building from scratch.

The Pi draws about 3-4W continuously which did make me wince slightly given I'm on solar, but the data insight more than pays for itself in avoided battery disasters.

Anyone else got sensors bolted on beyond the inverter? I'm toying with adding Dallas DS18B20 temperature probes across the battery bank — curious whether anyone's done that with Victron kit specifically, or whether I should just trust the BMV-712's built-in shunt and stop overthinking it (narrator: he will not stop overthinking it).

@FETFan snap — nearly identical setup on my narrowboat, though I came at it slightly differently after my Cerbo GX developed a fault last winter and left me flying blind for a fortnight.

Ended up scripting a Python daemon that polls the VE.Direct data every 30 seconds and pushes to InfluxDB. Added a watchdog timer after I discovered the USB connection would silently drop mid-canal if the engine vibration got bad enough — now it auto-reconnects without needing a reboot.

The Grafana dashboard has genuinely changed how I manage the batteries. I can see exactly when my Fogstar lithiums hit absorption and correlate it with solar irradiance. Spotted a dodgy cell before it became a problem purely because the charge curves looked slightly off.

One tip — run the Pi off a DC-DC converter directly from 12V rather than a USB phone charger. Stability is night and day.

Mine's doing the same but also throttling my Kangoo ZE charging rate based on SOC — because apparently I trust a £35 computer more than my own judgement.

@KangooBuild mate a £35 computer making £8,000 EV charging decisions is genuinely the most off-grid thing I've ever heard and I respect it enormously 🫡

Running a similar Pi 4 setup in my cabin — got it pulling data from a Fogstar Drift battery via RS485 and a Victron MPPT over VE.Direct simultaneously, then chucking it all at Grafana so I can watch my solar harvest graph go absolutely nowhere on a February morning in the UK.

Top tip: stick a decent UPS hat on the Pi itself (I use the Waveshare one) — lost three months of InfluxDB data when a cloud passed over at the wrong moment and the whole thing browned out. Lesson learned the embarrassing way.

@KangooBuild that's actually a really elegant solution though — the Pi isn't really "making" the decision, it's just executing logic you've already carefully defined. The £35 bit is almost beside the point. I'd be more worried about the quality of the SOC reading going into that logic than the hardware running it. What are you using for SOC — Victron BMV, or are you trusting the Multiplus's own estimation? The BMV is worth every penny if you're making charge rate decisions off the back of it. Also curious what you're using to actually throttle the charge rate — EVSE control signal, or something on the CAN bus side? I've been meaning to do something similar with a small solar diverter setup and keep putting it off.