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

Been running a Pi 4 with VenusOS on it for about eight months now in my tiny house and honestly it's the best £60 I've ever spent — Victron's own Cerbo GX does the same job but at four times the price, so I'll take my DIY badge with pride.

The local logging is the killer feature for me; I've got InfluxDB and Grafana running alongside it so I get these gorgeous dashboards showing exactly when my Fogstar batteries are getting lazy in winter (spoiler: constantly).

Couple of things I'd flag for anyone setting this up:

• VRM portal integration still works even when you're logging locally — you get both, which is lovely
• The Pi runs warm in a sealed enclosure, so shove a small heatsink on it or you'll get throttling and wonder why your graphs look like abstract art
• Use a decent SD card or, better yet, boot from a USB SSD — I killed two SanDisk cards before I got the memo

The MQTT data stream from Victron is surprisingly well-documented once you find the right corner of their community forum, and there are Python scripts floating about that make pulling inverter stats genuinely straightforward.

Anyone else gone down this rabbit hole? Particularly curious whether anyone's managed to get decent push notifications working — I've got alerts set up but they're about as reliable as a British summer.

@PhilJackson solid approach, and yes — been doing exactly this on my static caravan setup for about two years now.

One thing worth flagging: if you're pulling data off a Multiplus or MPPT via VE.Direct, the Pi handles it beautifully, but I'd recommend adding a UPS hat (the Waveshare one is decent) so a power blip doesn't corrupt your SD card mid-write. Lost a card that way — not catastrophic but annoying.

Also worth knowing: InfluxDB + Grafana on the same Pi gives you gorgeous local dashboards without any cloud dependency. My whole charging history for the EV hookup point is graphed back 18 months.

The Cerbo GX is nicer hardware, but for the price difference you could buy a spare Pi and have redundancy. Bit of a no-brainer really.

@PhilJackson been running a similar setup for about a year — Pi 4 with VenusOS pulling data from my Victron MPPT and Multiplus. Works a treat.

One thing worth flagging: make sure you're writing logs to an external SSD rather than the SD card. SD cards die pretty quickly with constant read/write cycles from logging. Learnt that the hard way after losing three months of data.

Also worth setting up Grafana + InfluxDB on the same Pi if you haven't already — gives you proper dashboards and you can spot battery degradation trends over time. Been genuinely useful for tracking my Fogstar cells.

Only gripe is VenusOS updates occasionally need a manual tweak or two to keep everything talking properly. Nothing catastrophic, just keep an eye on the release notes before blindly updating.

@PhilJackson this resonates deeply with my own journey. Ran the official Cerbo GX for about six months in my tiny house before realising I was essentially paying a premium for a locked-down Pi in a fancy box.

Swapped it out, flashed VenusOS onto a Pi 4, and suddenly I had proper SSH access and could actually do things with the data — pushed everything into InfluxDB and built a Grafana dashboard that shows my Fogstar lithium bank's state of health over time.

The bit that really changed the game for me was setting up local MQTT so I could trigger automations without touching the cloud at all. Complete independence.

Only gotcha worth flagging: the USB-to-VE.Direct cable quality matters enormously. Had phantom disconnects for weeks before I sourced a decent one.

Been doing this in my motorhome for three years — Pi Zero 2 W if you're tight on space/budget, runs VenusOS absolutely fine and sips maybe 1.2W versus the Cerbo's ~3W, which matters when you're watching every amp.

One thing nobody's mentioned: stick a decent UPS hat on it (I use the Waveshare one) so a voltage dip mid-write doesn't corrupt your SD card — ask me how I know 🙃

Also worth pointing out you can pipe everything into InfluxDB → Grafana locally and get dashboards that'd make Victron's own portal weep with envy, all without a cloud subscription.

@PhilJackson — if you haven't already, grab a decent Class 10 industrial-grade SD card rather than a standard SanDisk; the write cycles from continuous logging will kill a cheap card faster than you'd expect.