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

Been running a Pi 4 connected to my Victron MPPT and Multiplus via VE.Direct cables for about eight months now across both the van and the boat — two separate setups but same approach on both.

The Pi pulls everything into InfluxDB and I've got Grafana dashboards showing SOC, solar yield, battery voltage trends, the lot. Took a weekend to get it dialled in properly but now it just runs. No cloud dependency, no subscription, works fine when I'm on a mooring with no signal.

A few things I'd flag:

• VE.Direct to USB cables from Victron themselves are worth the extra — had a cheap knockoff cause all sorts of noise on the data line
• Set your InfluxDB retention policy early, before you've got months of data you don't want to lose
• The Victron Venus OS large image running on the Pi is a different route that some people prefer — essentially turns the Pi into a GX device. I went raw Python scripts instead because I wanted more control over what gets logged

The EV charging side is where it gets interesting for me — I'm logging when shore power's available at marinas versus relying on solar, trying to work out whether a second panel on the boat roof actually pencils out.

Anyone else gone down the Grafana route? Curious whether people are hosting dashboards locally only or tunnelling out somehow for remote access. I used Tailscale for that and it's been rock solid but I know some folk are wary of adding another service into the chain.

Been doing something similar @CharlieThomas but I went down the Venus OS Large route on the Pi rather than rolling my own solution. Gives you all the Victron integration out of the box plus you still get remote access via VRM if you want it, but crucially all the data stays local too.

One thing worth mentioning — I've got mine writing to InfluxDB with Grafana dashboards on top, and the historical visibility has been genuinely invaluable for spotting patterns I'd never have caught otherwise. Noticed my batteries weren't quite hitting absorption properly on overcast days, which turned out to be a charge profile tweak needed.

What are you using on the software side for your logging? And are you running both setups from separate Pis or trying to centralise anything?

@DanHughes makes a valid point about Venus OS Large, but there's a genuine case for rolling your own stack if you want granular control over retention periods and alerting logic.

I run InfluxDB + Grafana on a Pi 3B+ aboard my narrowboat, pulling data via vedirect-mqtt bridged through a separate Cerbo GX. The Pi handles roughly 18 months of 1-minute resolution data without breaking a sweat — something the default VRM cloud retention won't give you free of charge.

One pedantic but important note @CharlieThomas: if you're on VE.Direct cables directly to the Pi (not via a GX device), make sure you're not simultaneously connecting those same ports to anything else — VE.Direct is one-to-one. Caught people out before with that assumption.

What's your storage backend? SD cards will fail eventually — I'd strongly recommend a small USB SSD.

Been running almost the exact same setup in my shepherd's hut for two years now — Pi 4 talking to a Victron SmartSolar via VE.Direct, with InfluxDB and Grafana doing the pretty graphs.

The bit nobody mentions: SD card rot. Had three cards fail silently before I moved to a proper SSD on a USB adapter. The Pi would boot fine but InfluxDB was quietly eating corrupted data for weeks before I noticed my battery graphs looked suspiciously optimistic.

Move your InfluxDB write path off the SD card entirely. Your future self will be grateful.

Also worth noting — if you're logging at high frequency, tune your retention policies properly or you'll fill storage faster than you'd expect. I learned this the hard way when my hut Pi ground to a halt mid-January, which is precisely the worst time to lose your system monitoring.

Ran Venus OS Large on a Pi 3B+ for six months before it started throwing tantrums during firmware updates — switched to a custom Node-RED stack and haven't looked back, though I did accidentally graph my Fogstar battery temps in Fahrenheit for three weeks before noticing something was slightly off.

Been on the cut for three years now with a Pi 4 doing exactly this on the narrowboat. One thing I'll add that nobody's mentioned — power draw matters enormously when you're squeezing every amp from a 200Ah Fogstar lithium bank through winter.

Swapped to a Pi Zero 2W running a stripped-down Debian stack and it cut my monitoring overhead from around 3W to under 1W. Same InfluxDB + Grafana setup, same VE.Direct USB adapter from Victron.

The dashboard still shows everything I care about: state of charge, MPPT yield, battery temperature from the BMV-712.

Worth considering if you're on a boat where idle loads genuinely add up over a 48-hour lock-up in January.