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

Been running a Pi 4 with VictronConnect via the VE.Direct USB cable for a while now on my static caravan setup. Logs everything locally to InfluxDB and I visualise it with Grafana — proper satisfying dashboard once you've got it dialled in.

Main reason I went local rather than relying on the Victron Remote Monitoring portal was the monthly data limits on the free tier. Once you're watching solar yield, battery state, and inverter load all day, you burn through that pretty quick.

A few things worth knowing if you're setting this up:

• VE.Direct to USB is the easiest entry point — plug and play almost
• venus-docker on GitHub makes the whole stack much less painful to get running
• Keep the Pi on a stable 5V supply — I use a small DC-DC converter off the 12V bus rather than a phone charger, far more reliable
• A Pi Zero 2 W is plenty if you're just logging, saves a bit of power

Only gripe is occasionally the Pi drops off the network overnight and I lose a few hours of data. Thinking a watchdog cron job would sort that, just haven't got round to it.

Anyone else gone down this route? Curious whether anyone's integrated it with Home Assistant as well — I've seen a few threads elsewhere suggesting the Victron integration is solid but haven't tried it myself yet.

@FellLover yes, been doing something similar on the narrowboat for about 18 months now. Moved away from VictronConnect fairly quickly and switched to Venus OS Large on the Pi itself — turns it into a proper GX device essentially.

Key things I'd add:

• VE.Direct to USB adaptors can be a bit flaky if you're using a cheap powered hub; worth going direct into the Pi's own ports
• I run InfluxDB + Grafana locally for dashboarding, no cloud dependency whatsoever
• The MQTT broker that Venus OS exposes is genuinely useful if you want to tie in other sensors (I've got a BME280 for bilge temperature)

One thing I haven't cracked yet is reliable alerting when SOC drops overnight without pinging something external. Anyone solved that purely locally? Thinking maybe a Python script watching the MQTT topics and triggering the Pi's GPIO to sound a buzzer...

Great thread! I went down a slightly different route and set up Node-RED on my Pi 4 alongside InfluxDB and Grafana for the visualisation side. The dashboards are brilliant once you get them configured - you can see battery state, solar yield, and load consumption all on one screen with proper historical graphs.

One tip: if you're running VE.Direct over USB, make sure you've added your user to the dialout group on the Pi, otherwise you'll get frustrating permission errors that aren't always obvious to diagnose.

@FellLover @PanelEwan - have either of you looked at Venus OS Large running directly on the Pi itself? Victron actually support it officially now, which saves a fair bit of faffing about with custom scripts. Turns your Pi essentially into a proper Cerbo GX replacement for a fraction of the cost.

Running Venus OS Large on a Pi 4 is the dark horse option nobody mentions — turns your Pi into a full GX device with MQTT, Node-RED, and Signal K baked in, so @Davo's stack essentially comes free with the firmware.

VE.Direct USB straight into the Pi, flash the image from Victron's site, and suddenly your Multiplus thinks it's talking to a Cerbo GX at a fraction of the cost — my motorhome setup cost me about £60 in hardware versus £200+ for the real thing.

The VRM portal integration still works if you want cloud backup, but all your data stays local by default.

Only gotcha: not every Pi variant plays nicely, so check the Venus OS GitHub compatibility list before you buy anything — learned that the expensive way.

@MarineGeoff is absolutely right that Venus OS Large is underrated, but I'll add the bit nobody warns you about — the SD card will kill you.

Running InfluxDB or even just Venus OS with frequent writes on a standard SD card is a death sentence. Six months in, your Pi corrupts and you've lost everything. Learnt this the hard way on my motorhome setup.

Three things that actually fixed it for me:

• Boot from USB SSD instead (cheap Samsung 128GB job does fine)
• Or at minimum, move the database writes to USB storage and keep the SD read-only
• Enable log2ram if you're stubborn about SD cards

@Davo's Node-RED/Grafana stack is gorgeous when it's stable — but stable is the operative word. Sort your storage first, then obsess over dashboards.

@LiFePO4Nerd raises a fair warning about SD card wear. Worth noting that running Venus OS Large from a proper industrial-grade microSD (Samsung Pro Endurance or equivalent) buys you considerably more longevity, but the real fix is booting from a USB SSD instead — Pi 4 supports USB boot natively once you've updated the EEPROM. I've been logging VE.Direct data from my shepherd's hut Victron setup this way for two years without a single filesystem corruption. Pair that with SignalK if you're on a boat like I am and you get NMEA 2000 integration essentially for free on the same device. The SD card then just sits as a cold fallback image rather than taking constant write punishment from InfluxDB's measurement inserts.