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

Been doing exactly this for about 18 months now on the boat. Started with a Pi 4 I had gathering dust, installed Venus OS Large on it and suddenly had a proper GX device without paying Victron's prices for a Cerbo.

The VRM portal integration still works perfectly — all the data goes up to the cloud AND stays local on a InfluxDB/Grafana stack I bodged together one rainy weekend in Gloucester. Genuinely one of the most satisfying rabbit holes I've fallen down.

Few things worth mentioning for anyone just starting out:

• Venus OS Large is the magic ingredient — enables the Node-RED and Signal K stuff
• SD card reliability was my first headache. Moved the data directory to a USB SSD and haven't lost a night's sleep since
• Modbus TCP if you've got non-Victron kit to tie in (I'm pulling in my Fogstar battery BMS data this way)

The Grafana dashboards are chef's kiss — I can see exactly when my EV charging overnight is hammering the batteries versus what the solar's putting back in. Caught a parasitic drain of about 800mA I'd never have found otherwise.

Only gotcha — if you're on a marina with dodgy shore power (aren't we all), make sure the Pi itself has a clean supply. Mine was rebooting randomly for weeks before I put a small UPS on it. Embarrassingly obvious in hindsight.

Anyone else gone down the InfluxDB route or are people using different databases? Curious whether Prometheus is worth the faff for this kind of application.

@JohnDixon — yeah, Venus OS Large on a Pi is genuinely one of the best-kept secrets in the Victron world. Been running mine in the garden office setup for about two years now, Pi 4 with a cheap USB-to-VE.Direct cable from Amazon.

Couple of things worth knowing if you haven't hit them yet:

• SD card wear will eventually bite you — I moved the data directory to a USB SSD after my second card died
• The Node-RED integration baked into Venus OS Large is brilliant for custom automations (I trigger EV charging based on SOC thresholds)
• Worth enabling MQTT and chucking the data into InfluxDB + Grafana for proper historical graphs

Only downside is no official Victron support if something goes sideways, but honestly for the price difference that's a reasonable trade-off.

Running Venus OS Large on a Pi 4 in the motorhome for two years — pro tip: stick a decent UPS HAT on it so the Pi shuts down gracefully when your batteries dip, otherwise you'll spend a fun afternoon fixing a corrupted SD card like I did.

Also worth knowing:

• Use a good quality A2-rated SD card (Samsung Pro Endurance is solid) or better yet boot from USB SSD
• Enable Node-RED within Venus OS Large for some genuinely powerful automation — my heating kicks on automatically based on SOC
• VRM portal still works alongside local logging, so you get belt and braces

@WheresMeWires the "best-kept secret" framing is spot on — Victron essentially gave everyone a free Cerbo GX and most people still don't know it exists.

@MarineGeoff that UPS HAT point is worth expanding on — I'm running a Witty Pi 4 on mine in the shepherd's hut, which does scheduled wake/sleep rather than pure UPS duty, but I've also got a small 18650-based HAT underneath it purely for graceful shutdown. The two together mean the Pi survives both intentional power cycling and unexpected drops without filesystem corruption.

One thing I'd add that nobody's mentioned: if you're storing your VRM Portal data locally via InfluxDB + Grafana alongside Venus OS Large, watch your SD card write cycles. I killed two cards in eight months before moving the InfluxDB data directory to a cheap USB3 SSD. Night and day in terms of reliability. Fogstar do decent small-capacity cells if you're building your own UPS solution rather than buying a pre-made HAT.

Great thread, this. I've been running a similar setup in my static caravan for about a year — Pi 4 with Venus OS Large pulling data from a MultiPlus-II and a couple of SmartSolar controllers via VE.Direct cables.

One thing nobody's mentioned yet: InfluxDB + Grafana on the same Pi gives you beautiful historical graphs that Victron's own VRM portal honestly can't match for customisation. You can set retention policies to keep years of data locally without relying on cloud connectivity at all.

@ExPostie82 the Witty Pi scheduled shutdown is clever — does yours handle a sudden power loss gracefully though, or do you rely on the supercapacitor to ride through brief drops? I've had occasional SD card corruption on mine during unexpected cuts, which is why I switched to booting from a USB SSD rather than SD altogether. Worth doing regardless. 🙂

Running Venus OS Large on a Pi 4 in the motorhome for about eight months now — absolute game changer for the cost. One thing nobody's mentioned yet: storage matters more than you'd think. I killed two cheap SD cards before switching to an industrial-grade SanDisk Endurance card, and now I run the main OS from a small USB SSD instead with the SD just for boot. Much happier since.

Also worth noting — if you're connecting to Victron kit via VE.Direct to USB cables, buy genuine ones. I wasted weeks chasing phantom data errors before swapping out a dodgy third-party cable.

@Jock40 curious what you're using for remote access on the static — I'm using Tailscale on mine so I can check the motorhome dashboard from anywhere without port forwarding faff.