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

Been doing this for about 18 months now in my static and honestly it's been brilliant. Running a Pi 4 with Venus OS Large on it — pulls everything off the Cerbo GX via MQTT and shoves it into InfluxDB. Grafana dashboards on top and you've got proper visibility of what your system's doing.

Main reason I went local rather than relying on VRM portal was the internet out here is patchy at best. Still get all my historical data even when the connection drops.

Few things I learned the hard way:

• Use a decent SD card or better yet boot from SSD — I killed two cards in the first year with all the constant writes
• Set InfluxDB to downsample older data or your storage fills up fast
• Worth setting up Tailscale so you can check in remotely when you do have signal

Currently logging my Victron MPPT, MultiPlus-II and battery state from my Fogstar DIY LiFePO4 bank. The granularity you get compared to VRM is just on another level — 10 second intervals if you want them.

Anyone else gone down this rabbit hole? Curious whether others are using Node-RED in the mix as well, I've been tempted to set up some basic automations but not sure it's worth the added complexity on a simple van/caravan setup.

@Midge52 done exactly this in my shepherd's hut — Pi 4 running Grafana on top of InfluxDB and now I spend more time admiring pretty battery graphs than actually, y'know, using the hut.

One tip worth adding: set your InfluxDB retention policy sensibly early on or you'll end up with 18 months of 1-second interval data eating your SD card like a hungry Fogstar cell eats a bad BMS.

Also switched to a good quality SSD over SD card after losing two cards to corruption — the Pi writes constantly with this setup and SD cards proper hate it.

@Midge52 this rabbit hole is real and I fell down it hard last winter with my cabin setup. Went one step further and bolted Node-RED into the stack — so now instead of just logging the Victron data, the Pi is actually making decisions. State of charge drops below a threshold at a certain time of day, it fires a notification to my phone and throttles back a couple of non-essential loads automatically via some cheap wifi plugs.

The MQTT broker is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Once you realise the Cerbo is basically just chatting away constantly, you can intercept all sorts — grid setpoint, battery temperature, PV yield, the lot.

@BatteryPaula the Grafana dashboard addiction is real — mine's got more panels than my Fogstar batteries have cells at this point.

@BatteryPaula @StormyMechanic you two are absolutely a cautionary tale and I'm still going to do exactly the same thing 😂

Running a Pi Zero 2W at the moment just watching my Fogstar batteries via the Victron app like a normal person, but this thread has properly broken me. Give it a fortnight and I

Running this exact setup on my garden office — Pi 4, Cerbo GX, MQTT into InfluxDB, Grafana on top. Been solid for over a year.

Few tips that saved me headaches:

• Use a decent SD card or better yet boot from a USB SSD — SD cards die under constant write loads from InfluxDB
• Set up InfluxDB retention policies early, otherwise your database balloons fast
• The VRM MQTT topics list is your bible for knowing what data's available

@JakeWalker when you do inevitably fall down this rabbit hole, look at Telegraf as the collector between MQTT and InfluxDB — cleaner than scripting it yourself.

Also worth knowing Victron's own Venus OS Large can run InfluxDB natively if you want to skip the Pi entirely, though I prefer keeping them separate for resilience.