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

Been running exactly this setup for about eight months now across my shepherd's hut system and honestly it's transformed how I understand my energy use.

I've got a Raspberry Pi 4 pulling data from a Victron Cerbo GX via the local MQTT broker — no cloud dependency, everything stays on-site. Paired it with InfluxDB and Grafana, and now I've got beautiful dashboards showing SOC, solar yield, battery voltage trends, and load consumption going back months.

The real win came when I started charging my van from the hut's system. Being able to overlay the EV charging load against solar production meant I could fine-tune exactly when to start a charge session to avoid hammering the Fogstar batteries during cloudy patches.

A few things worth knowing if you're setting this up:

• VRM Local API works brilliantly without needing internet
• The dbus-mqtt bridge on the Cerbo is your friend — documentation is a bit buried but it's solid once you find it
• Set your Pi to write to an external SSD rather than the SD card — learned that one the hard way after a corruption event

The only faff was getting the Grafana alerts tuned properly so I wasn't getting pinged at midnight about perfectly normal overnight discharge cycles.

Anyone else gone down this route? Curious whether others are pulling in weather forecast data to anticipate low-yield days — I've been eyeing up the Open-Meteo API for this but haven't pulled the trigger yet. Also interested if anyone's managed to get consumption data from a Renogy charge controller alongside Victron kit in the same dashboard.

@QuietMaker really curious about this — what software stack are you running to pull the Victron data? Is it going through the VE.Direct USB cable or are you using the Cerbo GX as an intermediary?

I've been wanting to do something similar for my cabin setup. Currently flying blind with just the Victron app which feels like it loses historical data too quickly for my liking. Would love to see proper long-term trends, especially correlating solar input against EV charging sessions — I'm running a small inverter setup and trying to work out whether I can reliably charge the car overnight from stored capacity.

Does the Pi log to InfluxDB/Grafana or something simpler? Wondering how much headache the initial setup actually is for someone who's comfortable with basic Linux but not a developer.

@QuietMaker eight months of data is where things get genuinely interesting — you start spotting seasonal patterns you'd never have noticed otherwise.

Running almost identical on the narrowboat. Pi 4 pulling from the Victron via VE.Direct to USB, feeding into InfluxDB with Grafana on top. Skipped the Venus OS large image route because frankly I wanted full control over what was being logged and where it was going.

The bit nobody warns you about: SD card wear. Lost three months of data when a card failed last winter. Moved the write-heavy InfluxDB storage to a USB SSD and haven't looked back.

@OffGridFreak — it's not going through VRM at all, that's rather the point. Local-only. Your data stays yours, no subscription creep, no cloud dependency if the internet goes down. Which on the cut, it frequently does.

Been doing something similar on the boat for about two years now. VenusOS on a Cerbo GX feeds into Node-RED, then InfluxDB, Grafana on top. Runs fine on a Pi 3B+ even.

One thing worth knowing — if you're pulling direct from the Victron kit via the VE.Direct USB cable rather than going through the GX device, the data granularity is better but you'll need the vedirect Python library and a bit of patience getting the serial permissions sorted on Raspbian.

@Spider is right about seasonal patterns. My winter solar vs. battery degradation graphs made for fairly grim reading last year if I'm honest. At least I knew rather than guessing.

Main annoyance is SD card failures. Worth pointing your InfluxDB data directory at a proper SSD on USB rather than running everything off the card.

@BodgeItAndScarper two years of data and you're still living on a boat — clearly the monitoring isn't showing you anything alarming enough to leave 😄

Done this on my van conversion for about a year. Got a Pi Zero 2 W talking to a Victron SmartShunt via VE.Direct — shoves everything into InfluxDB and Grafana does the pretty graphs.

The bit that surprised me most was seeing exactly how much the fridge compressor cycles overnight. Thought I had a rough idea but the actual data was... humbling. Adjusted my Fogstar 206Ah battery expectations accordingly.

One thing worth mentioning — the Pi Zero draws barely anything itself, which matters when you're parked up with no hookup and being precious about every watt.

@BodgeItAndScarper curious whether you're logging temperature sensors too or just the electrical side? I've been thinking about adding a DS18B20 to monitor battery compartment temp but haven't got round to it.