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 across my garden office setup and it's been rock solid. Pulls all the Victron data via the VE.Direct USB cable from my SmartSolar and feeds it into InfluxDB, then Grafana for the dashboards.

Main reason I went local rather than just relying on VRM is keeping historical data indefinitely without paying for anything — VRM's free tier is fine but I wanted more granular control over what gets stored and how.

A few things I've learnt along the way:

• SD card wear is a real concern. Worth pointing the InfluxDB write path to a USB SSD rather than the card itself
• Venus OS Large image gives you the Node-RED integration which is genuinely useful if you want automations based on SOC thresholds
• Power consumption of the Pi is worth factoring in — mine draws around 3-4W, which adds up when you're running off a modest battery bank

Currently doing the same for my van conversion project but that one's trickier — debating whether a Pi Zero 2W is sufficient or if I should just stick with the full Pi 4.

Anyone running Cerbo GX alongside a Pi, or have you replaced the Cerbo entirely? I've seen people argue both ways but can't work out if the Cerbo adds enough to justify the cost given what a Pi can do for a fraction of the price.

Also curious whether anyone's set up alerts — MQTT to a Telegram bot or similar — for things like low SOC or grid disconnect events.

Been doing this on my static van for two years — stick a VE.Direct to USB cable in, flash Venus OS Large on the Pi, and you've got a proper GX device for about £40 instead of Victron's £200+ Cerbo GX... though obviously I'll never admit that publicly to Victron's marketing department.

One tip: add a UPS HAT or at least a decent supercapacitor board to the Pi — corrupt SD cards from power cuts are the number one way this setup turns from "rock solid" to "why is everything offline at 2am."

Also worth enabling MQTT locally and chucking data into InfluxDB + Grafana — suddenly you can see your Fogstar batteries slowly dying in glorious technicolour graphs rather than just vague dread.

@ExJoiner19 @Rob1963 — been running almost exactly the same setup on my motorhome for the past year, but I went one step further and wired the Pi into the 12V system via a proper buck converter so it survives engine-off without draining the Fogstar lithium too badly.

The bit that surprised me was how well the Node-RED dashboard plays with Venus OS Large — I've got it pushing daily kWh summaries to a little e-ink display mounted on the wall. Feels very "proper" compared to the Victron Remote Management portal, which is fine but relies on an internet connection I don't always have parked up in the middle of nowhere.

One thing worth watching — the Pi 4 does run warm in a confined locker. Passive heatsink case made a noticeable difference to stability on mine.

Running this exact setup on the boat for about fourteen months now. The Pi lives in a waterproof enclosure I definitely measured correctly the first time and absolutely didn't have to attack with a Dremel at midnight.

One thing nobody's mentioned — label your USB cables before you close the enclosure lid. I have three identical black cables going into that Pi and I

@ExJoiner19 Worth noting that if you're pulling data from multiple Victron devices simultaneously, the VE.Direct USB adapters can occasionally cause USB enumeration headaches on the Pi — particularly if you're running three or more. Had this exact issue on my own setup; two SmartSolars plus a BMV-712 kept dropping one device after a USB hub firmware update.

Fix that worked for me: add usbcore.autosuspend=-1 to your /boot/cmdline.txt. Stops the Pi aggressively power-managing the USB ports and the dropouts vanished entirely.

Also worth mentioning — if you want historical data retention beyond what Venus OS natively stores, piping everything into InfluxDB with a Grafana frontend gives you genuinely long-term logging. My battery cycle data now goes back fourteen months without a single gap, which has been invaluable for tracking Fogstar Drift cell degradation over time.