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

Been running exactly this setup for about 18 months now at the static van. Got a Pi 4 wired up via USB to the Victron MPPT and a BMV-712, pulling everything into VictronConnect first then piping it all through Venus OS Large which I flashed onto the Pi itself.

Honestly the best thing I ever did. Full local logging, no cloud dependency, and I can see every amp in and out going back over a year. Caught a dodgy Fogstar battery cell early because the charge curves suddenly looked wrong — would never have spotted it just glancing at the MPPT display.

The setup I'd recommend:

• Pi 4 (2GB) — plenty of headroom
• Venus OS Large flashed to a good quality SD or better yet a USB SSD
• Node-RED + InfluxDB + Grafana stack on top for the pretty graphs
• VE.Direct to USB cables from Victron (worth buying genuine ones, the cheap knock-offs caused me grief)

The Grafana dashboards are genuinely addictive. My missus thinks I've lost the plot because I check them more than actual telly.

Only pain point — keeping Venus OS updated occasionally breaks something in the Node-RED flows and you spend an afternoon swearing at config files. But that's half the fun, isn't it.

Anyone else gone down this rabbit hole? Curious whether anyone's managed to get Modbus TCP working reliably alongside it, that's my current project and it's being a proper nightmare.

@FellKev been doing almost exactly this on the narrowboat for two years now, except I ditched the VictronConnect middleman fairly early on. Running Venus OS Large on the Pi 4 directly — makes the Pi behave as a proper GX device. Everything talks to it natively over USB/VE.Direct, and I'm pushing the data locally into InfluxDB + Grafana rather than faff about with the VRM portal.

The one thing that'll bite you living on water: condensation. Lost a Pi 3 to it before I started boxing everything properly in a vented enclosure with silica gel. Lesson learned the expensive way.

Worth noting — Venus OS Large also runs Node-RED natively, so you can build automations without touching a command line, which honestly saved my sanity more than once.

Running something similar in the shepherd's hut — Pi Zero 2W pulling data from a SmartShunt via VE.Direct USB cable, straight into Node-RED then InfluxDB/Grafana stack. No VictronConnect in the loop at all.

The bit that took me ages to nail was getting the VE.Direct parser reliable — ended up using the vedirect Python library rather than rolling my own. Worth it though, been rock solid since.

One thing I'd add that nobody's mentioned: set your Pi to read-only filesystem mode. SD cards hate constant database writes and I killed two before I learned that lesson. Moved the InfluxDB data directory to a small USB SSD and it's been flawless for about eight months now.

@FellKev curious what you're using for visualisation on your end?

@TinaHenderson same setup as me — shepherd's hut with a Pi pulling SmartShunt data. I went one step further and stuck Grafana on top of InfluxDB so I get proper dashboards. Really handy for spotting patterns over the winter months when the panels are barely pulling anything.

One thing worth doing — set the Pi to read-only filesystem mode so a dodgy power cut doesn't corrupt your SD card. Learnt that the hard way after losing a month of data. Running off a decent USB SSD now rather than SD anyway, much more reliable.

Anyone experimented with automating alerts? I've got a Python script that pings my phone via Telegram if SOC drops below 20% overnight. Simple but effective.

Really useful thread — been lurking on this for a while as I'm planning something similar for the boat.

One thing worth flagging for anyone going down this route: power consumption of the Pi itself matters a lot in a small off-grid system. A Pi 4 can pull 3-5W continuously which adds up over winter when your panels are barely generating.

I've been using a Pi Zero 2W like @TinaHenderson for my emergency backup monitoring — draws around 0.5-1W — and it's been rock solid. Runs dbus-serialbattery and logs to a local InfluxDB instance without breaking a sweat.

For the boat specifically I'm also looking at adding a VE.Can interface to pull data from multiple devices rather than juggling separate USB adaptors. Anyone done that on a Victron multidevice setup?