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

Running a Pi 4 with VictronConnect data piped through Node-RED into InfluxDB, displayed on a Grafana dashboard so gorgeous it makes my Multiplus II feel like a celebrity. 📊

The whole setup cost me about £60 in Pi bits from CPC Farnell, which is frankly embarrassing value compared to what Victron charge for their cloud monitoring — love the kit, but some of us live off-grid precisely because we enjoy not paying subscriptions to exist.

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

• Venus OS Large on the Pi is an absolute game-changer — turns it into a proper GX device
• Cerbo GX alternative? The Pi genuinely handles it, though I did initially fry one Pi pretending I knew what I was doing with the RS485 wiring
• Local storage means your data survives when your rural broadband does its usual impression of a damp napkin
• Fogstar battery state-of-charge readings through the Pi dashboard are chef's kiss accurate

The only downside is I now spend more time staring at pretty graphs than actually, you know, living off-grid — my Renogy panels are basically funding my data addiction at this point.

Anyone else gone full Venus OS on theirs, or are you rolling a custom integration? Also curious whether anyone's managed decent MPPT alerts without losing the will to live configuring Node-RED flows — mine are currently held together with hope and copy-pasted YAML.

Been running almost the exact same stack on a Pi 3B+ for about 18 months now — handles it fine, no need to upgrade to a 4 unless you're doing something heavier.

One thing worth adding: I've got mine pulling data from the Victron GX MQTT broker directly rather than VictronConnect, which feels more stable long-term. Fewer moving parts.

The dashboard is genuinely addictive. I've got separate panels for the garden office loads, EV charging sessions, and the narrowboat when she's home on shore power. Lets me see exactly where the kWh are going.

📊 makes my Multiplus II feel like a celebrity

Wait until you add alerting — Grafana pinging you when SOC drops below 20% at 2am hits different. Slightly panicky, but useful.

Great thread to land on as a newcomer, @DailyAdventure — welcome aboard! 🎉

Running a very similar setup on my narrowboat. One thing worth adding to the Pi stack: pair it with a Victron Cerbo GX and you get MQTT data straight out of the box — dead easy to pipe into Node-RED without any fiddling with VictronConnect's Bluetooth.

Also worth chucking a UPS HAT on the Pi so a brief power dip doesn't corrupt your SD card mid-write. Lost a whole month of Grafana data learning that lesson the hard way.

If anyone's just starting out and feeling overwhelmed — don't be. The offgrid4less community here is brilliant for troubleshooting. Start simple, get one metric logging cleanly, then build from there. Half my dashboard grew organically over six months.

Really interested in this thread as I'm on a narrowboat myself and always looking to improve my monitoring setup.

Quick question for @SmartSolar_Master — are you pulling data directly via the Victron GX device (Cerbo or similar), or doing something else on the narrowboat? I've been using a Cerbo GX with VRM portal but I'd quite like local logging as a fallback for when I'm in a tunnel or somewhere with no signal.

Also wondering about reliability in a damp narrowboat environment — has anyone had issues with SD card corruption on the Pi over time? I've read that's a known weak point, and on a boat you can't exactly pop to PC World if it fails.

Would an SSD boot drive be worth the extra faff for this kind of always-on logging setup?

Running this exact stack in my motorhome — one tip worth adding: stick a good quality SD card in (Samsung Endurance Pro series is what I use), because standard cards hate the constant InfluxDB write cycles and will die on you faster than a leisure battery from a car boot sale.

Also worth looking at Venus OS Large on the Pi itself — Victron's own image turns the Pi into a proper GX device, so you get native MPPT/Multiplus data over VE.Direct or VE.Can without fiddling with VictronConnect bridging. Plays nicely with Node-RED and your Grafana stack on top.

@ExJoiner for a narrowboat specifically, the VE.Bus Smart Dongle is tidy if you want wireless data capture without running cables everywhere — pairs straight into the same pipeline these folks are describing.