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

Been running a Pi 4 (2GB) for about 18 months now doing exactly this and it's been rock solid. Using Venus OS Large on it rather than the official Cerbo GX, which saves a fair bit of cash and gives you way more flexibility.

The setup I landed on:

• Venus OS Large handles the Victron comms over USB (MPPT and MultiPlus both showing up cleanly)
• InfluxDB storing all the time-series data locally
• Grafana for the dashboards — the visualisation is miles better than VRM in my opinion

The big win for me was keeping everything local. VRM is fine but I don't love being dependent on Victron's servers for my own system data. With this setup the Pi is pulling and storing everything even if the internet's down, which out here happens more than I'd like.

One thing worth flagging — the SD card will eventually give up the ghost from all the write cycles. I moved mine onto a USB SSD (cheap Samsung one) pretty early on and haven't looked back. Running log2ram as well just to be safe.

Anyone else gone down the Node-RED route on top of this? I've got some basic automations running but feel like I'm only scratching the surface. Particularly interested in whether anyone's used it to do smart EV charging based on battery state and forecast generation — that's the next thing on my list and I reckon the Pi could handle the logic without breaking a sweat.

Would love to see other people's Grafana dashboards too if anyone's willing to share screenshots.

@WheresMeWires solid setup. Been doing something similar on the boat for two years but went with a Pi 3B+ rather than a 4 — runs Venus OS Large without breaking a sweat and the lower power draw matters when you're already counting watts.

One thing worth adding that most people overlook: write cycles on the SD card will kill it eventually. Running InfluxDB locally hammers the card. I moved my data directory to a cheap USB SSD and the Pi boots off a good quality card (SanDisk Endurance series). No failures since.

Also running Grafana dashboards alongside it — the Victron integration via MQTT is genuinely excellent once you've got it configured. You can pull SOC, battery voltage, PV yield, the lot.

If anyone's struggling with the initial Venus OS image flashing, the Victron community wiki is surprisingly decent documentation.

@WheresMeWires running Venus OS Large on a Pi is the cheat code Victron doesn't want you to know about 🤫

Done exactly this on the narrowboat for about a year — paired it with Node-RED and InfluxDB so I've got beautiful Grafana dashboards showing every amp that's ever looked at my Fogstar batteries. The local logging is the killer feature for me; no cloud dependency means the data keeps flowing even when we're moored somewhere with zero signal (which, if you're on the cut, is most of the time).

One tip: shove a decent UPS hat on the Pi so it survives voltage dips during heavy inverter loads — lost one SD card the hard way learning that lesson. Read-only root filesystem config also helps massively with SD longevity.

Just chiming in here as I've been running a similar setup but added InfluxDB and Grafana on top to get proper historical graphs rather than just the built-in VRM dashboard stuff. The Pi handles it all without breaking a sweat honestly. One tip - if you're storing data locally, shove the database onto a USB stick or small SSD rather than the SD card. Learnt that the hard way when my card gave up after about eight months of constant writes. @ExSquaddie49 worth doing on the boat setup too if you haven't already, damp environments aren't kind to SD cards at the best of times. The Grafana dashboards you can build are genuinely miles better than anything VRM offers out of the box for spotting patterns in your usage.

@BitsAndBobs9 InfluxDB + Grafana is the only sane way to actually look at your data without wanting to throw the Pi into the canal — which, living on a narrowboat, is a genuine occupational hazard for me.

Worth noting for anyone tempted: shove the database onto a proper SSD via USB rather than running it on the SD card, unless you enjoy the ritual of rebuilding your entire setup every six months when the card corrupts itself at 11pm on a bank holiday weekend.

Also set your retention policies properly in InfluxDB or it'll quietly eat your storage alive — learned that one the hard way when my EV charging logs filled the disk and killed the whole stack.