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

Been running a Pi 4 (2GB) with Venus OS Large for about 18 months now and it's transformed how I manage my LiFePO4 bank. The native Victron integration is rock solid — picks up the MultiPlus and SmartShunt over VE.Direct without any fiddling.

What really made it sing was adding InfluxDB and Grafana on top. I've got dashboards showing state of charge trends going back over a year, which has been invaluable for spotting capacity drift in individual cells. Caught a Fogstar cell starting to lag behind the others about three months before it would've caused any real grief.

A few things worth noting for anyone setting this up:

• SD card wear is a genuine concern — move your InfluxDB data directory to a USB SSD, not the card itself
• Venus OS Large handles the MQTT broker natively, so Grafana can pull data without needing Node-RED as a middleman (though I still use Node-RED for automation logic)
• Keep a spare Pi imaged and ready. Mine died during a firmware update last winter and I was flying blind for two days

The one area I'm still not fully happy with is alerting. Currently using Grafana alerts emailed to myself but the latency is sometimes 5-10 minutes, which isn't ideal if something's going sideways quickly.

Curious whether anyone's integrated this with Home Assistant instead, or found a tighter alerting solution. Also interested if anyone's doing this on a Pi Zero 2W to keep the power draw down — my Pi 4 pulls around 3-4W which adds up over a year off-grid.

Great thread @CamperShaun! I've been running a similar setup but went down the Venus OS Large route on a Pi 3B+ initially, then upgraded to a 4 when prices dropped back to sensible levels.

One thing worth mentioning that I haven't seen discussed much - if you enable the Node-RED instance that comes bundled with Venus OS Large, you can set up some really useful automations. I've got mine sending a Telegram notification if my SOC drops below 20% overnight, which has saved me a couple of times when I forgot to plug in shore power.

Also make sure you're running the SD card in read-only mode or better yet boot from an SSD via USB - had one card corrupt itself after about eight months and lost all my historical data. Painful lesson learned the hard way!

Been doing this since Pi 3B days — the real gem nobody mentions is pairing Venus OS Large with Node-RED and pushing data to InfluxDB + Grafana locally, no cloud dependency whatsoever.

@CamperShaun if your LiFePO4 bank is anything like my Fogstar Drift cells, the granular SoC logging alone will reveal charge patterns you'd never spot glancing at a Cerbo screen.

Few practical notes:

• Use a decent SD card or better yet boot from USB SSD — SD card rot will ruin your day at the worst moment
• Set Venus OS to read-only filesystem where possible to extend storage life
• The dbus-spy tool is your best friend for debugging custom integrations

@RobWebb59 the 3B+ will struggle slightly with Large if you're running Node-RED and SignalK simultaneously — worth knowing before adding more services.

Been running Venus OS Large on a Pi 4 (4GB) on the narrowboat for two years now, and the bit nobody talks about is what happens when the Pi dies at 11pm on a Friday in the middle of nowhere.

Learned the hard way — keep a spare SD card with a cloned image. I use Win32DiskImager to snapshot monthly. Whole system restoration takes about four minutes versus a weekend of head-scratching.

Also worth knowing: if you're pulling data into InfluxDB + Grafana, set your retention policy sensibly. I left mine on infinite and the database eventually ate itself after 18 months of 10-second interval logging.

@RobWebb59 the 3B+ handles Venus fine but struggles once you bolt Grafana on top — the 4 really earns its keep there.

Really resonates with me this thread. I've had Venus OS Large running on a Pi 4 for about eight months now, logging everything from my Victron SmartSolar and Multiplus-II out to the garden office.

The thing that genuinely surprised me was how much the historical data changed my behaviour. I could see that my Fogstar Drift 200Ah battery was sitting at near-100% SoC every afternoon — completely unnecessary cycling at the top end. Dropped the absorption voltage slightly, set a scheduled charge limit via Node-RED, and the cells are thanking me for it.

One practical tip: mount the Pi's SD card image to a USB SSD instead. I killed two cards before someone on here pointed that out. The constant write cycles from VRM logging are brutal on SD cards.

@BoxerCamper curious whether you've seen similar wear issues on the narrowboat given the vibration environment?

Been lurking on this thread with interest — I've been toying with this for my cabin setup but haven't pulled the trigger yet.

Quick question for those running it: how much of a faff is the initial setup if you're not particularly Linux-savvy? I can follow a guide but I'm not writing scripts from scratch.

Also, does Venus OS Large play nicely with a Fogstar BMS, or does it need to be a Victron SmartShunt doing the battery monitoring? I've got a Victron MPPT already so that side should be fine.

@MarkGibson — eight months of data sounds really useful, especially for understanding seasonal solar yield. That's partly what's drawing me to this over just relying on the VRM portal cloud logging.