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

Running a Pi 4 in my van with VictronConnect data piped through Venus OS Large and honestly it's the nerdiest thing I've ever done, which is saying something given I spent a weekend cable-managing a Transit.

The setup pulls everything from my Multiplus and SmartShunt into InfluxDB, then Grafana turns it into the kind of beautiful graphs that make you genuinely excited when a cloud passes over your solar panels.

Few things worth knowing if you're going down this rabbit hole:

• Venus OS Large on the Pi basically turns it into a proper Cerbo GX for about £60 in hardware — absolute bargain compared to Victron's official kit
• Fogstar batteries play nicely once you've got the BMS talking over VE.Bus
• Keep your Pi on a proper regulated 5V supply — I fried one running it directly off a cheap USB buck converter and wept openly in a layby in Snowdonia

The local logging means I'm not dependent on Victron's cloud servers having a good day, which given I'm often parked somewhere with no signal anyway is rather the point.

Anyone else gone down the Node-RED route for automations on top of this? I've got mine theoretically able to switch on my diesel heater based on battery state but it mostly just sends me passive-aggressive notifications at 2am instead.

What hardware are people pairing this with — Pi 4, Pi 5, or something else entirely? Curious whether the Pi 5 is worth the extra pennies for this use case or if I'm just being

CopperGaffer | Posts: 847

@PeakNomad nice setup! I've been running something similar but went a step further — got Grafana pulling from InfluxDB on mine so I get proper historical graphs rather than just the Venus dashboard. The visualisations are genuinely useful for spotting patterns, like realising my fridge compressor was hammering the batteries every night between 2-4am far more than I'd expected.

One thing worth mentioning: make sure you've got your Pi on a decent DC-DC converter rather than just a cheap USB charger off the leisure battery. I lost a week of logged data when mine browned out during a heavy discharge cycle. Lesson learned the hard way! A Meanwell or Victron Orion sorted it completely.

What are you actually logging — just the MPPT and BMV, or inverter data too?

SunnyFisher | Posts: 213

Watching this thread with great interest — I've been meaning to do something similar on the narrowboat but kept putting it off because I genuinely have no idea where to start with Pi setups.

Quick question for the thread: does Venus OS Large require a specific Pi model, or will my ancient Pi 3B+ actually cut it? It's currently just gathering dust next to my Victron SmartShunt doing absolutely nothing useful.

Also — how are you lot handling it when the Pi loses power during a blackout? Slightly defeats the purpose of emergency backup monitoring if the thing that's supposed to tell you everything's fine goes down first. Is a small UPS the obvious answer or am I missing something obvious? 🙈

WillHall | Posts: 412

Great thread @PeakNomad! I've been running Venus OS Large on a Pi 4 for about eight months now and it's been rock solid. One thing worth mentioning that hasn't come up yet — I'd strongly recommend setting up a proper UPS for the Pi itself, even something simple like a PiJuice hat. Lost a couple of SD cards to sudden power cuts before I did that, which was a right pain. Also switched to running the OS from a USB SSD rather than the SD card; makes a noticeable difference to reliability and write endurance. @SunnyFisher if you do go ahead with it, the Venus OS community forum is brilliant for getting started — loads of UK van dwellers active on there too.

Foggy | Posts: 631

Great to see others doing this! One thing I'd add that hasn't been mentioned — if you're running Venus OS Large on a Pi 4, it's worth setting up a watchdog timer so the Pi auto-reboots if Venus hangs. Lost a weekend's worth of data once because it had silently crashed and I hadn't noticed. Lesson learned.

Also @WillHall and @SunnyFisher — if you're storing data locally, keep an eye on SD card wear. I switched to a small USB SSD as the root filesystem and haven't looked back. SD cards and constant database writes are a miserable combination in my experience.

@PeakNomad — are you pushing the data into InfluxDB and Grafana, or using something else for visualisation? Curious what dashboard setup people are settling on these days.