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

Been running a Pi 4 on the boat for about 18 months now, pulling data from my Victron kit via a VE.Direct to USB cable. Works an absolute treat.

Using VictronConnect data into InfluxDB with Grafana dashboards — gives me way more granularity than the VRM portal alone. Can see exactly what my solar is doing minute by minute, correlate it with battery state, the lot.

Few things I found useful on a narrowboat specifically:

• Power consumption of the Pi itself matters when you're tight on amps — I've got mine running off a small 5V converter directly from the 12V bus, draws barely anything
• Worth setting up automatic restarts if the Pi loses power unexpectedly (which happens when you're cruising and things get switched about)
• Local logging means you've got your data even when you're in a tunnel with no signal for 20 minutes 😄

Only faff was getting the dependencies sorted initially — there's a decent GitHub repo (dbus-serialbattery related stuff pointed me toward it) but took a bit of head-scratching.

Anyone running this with a Multiplus as well? Curious whether the VE.Bus data comes through cleanly or if you need the MK3-USB interface. I've only got MPPT solar controllers and a BMV-712 on mine at the moment.

Also wondering if anyone's bothered with Node-RED instead of Grafana — seems like it might be overkill but I've seen a few setups using it for automations too which is tempting.

@BirchTrevor - running almost identical setup on my narrowboat. One thing worth flagging: VictronConnect itself doesn't expose data directly to InfluxDB — you'll likely be using venus-data-logger or pulling from the MQTT broker on a Venus OS device (Cerbo GX etc.), or possibly victron-vedirect-influxdb if you're going direct from the cable.

If you're on straight VE.Direct to Pi with no Cerbo, look at the vedirect.py library — it decodes the serial protocol nicely. I pipe that into InfluxDB 2.x then visualise in Grafana. Whole stack runs happily on a Pi Zero 2W drawing barely anything from my 12V bus via a Pololu regulator.

Worth setting InfluxDB's retention policy sensibly — I keep 90 days high-res, then downsample to hourly for the long-term archive. Otherwise the SD card suffers.

@BirchTrevor worth noting that VE.Direct cables work fine but if you've got multiple devices you'll want to look at the VE.Can to USB route instead — one cable handles the lot.

I run a Pi 4 on my static caravan setup pulling from a Victron Multiplus and a SmartShunt. Went with Grafana over the top of InfluxDB for visualisation — dashboards are actually decent once you stop fiddling with them.

One thing I'd be skeptical about: people running these Pis off USB from the Victron itself. SD card corruption is real when power cuts unexpectedly. Either use a proper UPS hat or move to an SSD — I learned that the hard way after losing three months of data.

Been doing almost exactly this on my static caravan for two winters now — though I went down the Venus OS Large route on a Pi 3B+ rather than wrestling with raw VE.Direct parsing.

The thing that took me ages to sort out was dashboard persistence after power cuts. If your Pi loses power unexpectedly, InfluxDB can corrupt its write-ahead log. Learned that the hard way after a particularly grim January storm knocked my setup sideways.

Fixed it by:

• Moving the InfluxDB data directory to a proper SSD rather than the SD card
• Adding a small UPS hat on the Pi itself, fed from a Victron Orion DC-DC

Means the Pi shuts down cleanly if things get really dire. Eighteen months of clean data since then — worth the faff.

@RelayDream is absolutely right about multiple devices too, that rabbit hole is real.

@BirchTrevor absolute rabbit hole, isn't it? I went down this exact path with Kangoo (my van conversion) about a year ago.

One thing nobody's mentioned yet — if you're running the Pi headless and your SD card eventually gives up the ghost (and it will, because that's just the universe's way of keeping us humble), consider moving your InfluxDB storage onto a small USB SSD instead. Saved me an absolute nightmare when my card died mid-winter in a Tesco car park in Inverness.

Also worth wiring the Pi off a dedicated Victron SmartShunt aux output rather than your main 12V bus — keeps everything cleaner and means the logging survives even if you're doing fuse work elsewhere.

Grafana dashboards on a cheap touchscreen mounted on the dash is the real endgame though. Feels properly NASA once it's running. 🚀