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

Been running a Pi 4 with Venus OS for about eight months now and honestly it's transformed how I understand my system. Previously I was just glancing at the Victron app occasionally but now I've got Grafana dashboards showing me everything — battery state of charge trends, solar yield by hour, inverter load patterns, the lot.

The setup wasn't entirely painless. Getting the USB connection stable between the Pi and my Multiplus took a bit of fiddling, and I had to follow a few different guides before it all clicked. The Victron Venus OS Large image is the route I'd recommend — gives you Node-RED and SignalK baked in which opens up a lot of possibilities.

A few things I'm still trying to work out:

• Is anyone pushing their data to InfluxDB locally rather than using the VRM portal cloud? Wondering about retention settings and how much storage you're actually using over time
• Has anyone set up local alerts — like a notification if SOC drops below a threshold overnight without relying on Victron's cloud?
• Would a Pi Zero 2W be powerful enough or is the Pi 4 worth keeping for this task?

My system is a 5.1kWh Fogstar Drift LiFePO4 with a Victron Multiplus-II and a couple of Renogy panels, so nothing massive, but I still generate a surprising amount of data.

Curious whether others have gone down this rabbit hole and what your setups look like. Seems like there's a lot of potential here beyond just basic logging that I haven't tapped into yet.

@Chris1966 yeah been doing similar in the van for about a year now. Running a Pi Zero 2W with Venus OS Large and piping everything into InfluxDB + Grafana. The dashboard on my phone is genuinely addictive 😅

One thing worth flagging - the Zero 2W gets a bit toasty in a warm van in summer so chucked a small heatsink on it. No drama since.

The biggest win for me was spotting that my Fogstar 200Ah battery was hitting absorption weirdly early every morning - turned out a cell was slightly out of balance. Never would've caught that just eyeballing the Victron app.

Anyone tried pulling in temperature sensors via the GPIO as well? Got a Dallas DS18B20 on the battery terminals but not convinced the readings are dead accurate yet.

Interesting thread — been meaning to do something similar on the boat but haven't pulled the trigger yet.

Quick question for @Chris1966 and @Brummie86: does the Pi need to stay permanently connected to your Victron kit via USB/VE.Direct, or can it pull data over the local network from a Cerbo GX? I've already got a Cerbo installed and ideally wouldn't want duplicate hardware talking to the same MPPT and inverter.

Also curious whether either of you are logging to a local database (InfluxDB seems to come up a lot?) or just relying on the built-in Venus OS storage. Marine environments can be a bit brutal on SD cards and I've read that write cycles become an issue over time — has anyone dealt with that by booting off an SSD instead?

Really glad you're both getting into this! @MuddyTinker the boat environment is actually a great use case — being able to review overnight discharge patterns and solar harvest history without relying on remote connectivity makes a lot of sense when you're at anchor or in a marina with patchy signal.

One thing worth mentioning that I don't think's been covered yet: if you're going down the Venus OS route, do look at the Node-RED integration that comes bundled with Venus OS Large. I've got mine sending alerts to my phone via Telegram when battery drops below a certain SOC — dead useful if you're away from the boat for a few days. Took about an afternoon to set up properly.

@Chris1966 what are you using for your dashboards — Grafana with InfluxDB, or something simpler?

@MuddyTinker one thing worth knowing for a boat install — give the Pi itself some protection from condensation. I learned this the hard way on mine. A small enclosure with a silica gel pack makes a real difference in a damp bilge area.

Also worth looking at Grafana + InfluxDB on top of Venus OS if you want proper historical graphs. Takes an afternoon to set up but once it's running you get beautiful long-term trend data — really useful for spotting if your battery capacity is degrading over time or catching a dodgy cell before it becomes a problem.

The Victron VRM portal is handy but having everything local means you're not reliant on an internet connection, which on a mooring can be patchy at best.