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

Been running a Pi 4 (2GB) connected to my Cerbo GX via VE.Direct for about 18 months now and honestly it's transformed how I understand my garden office setup.

Using VictronConnect data piped into InfluxDB + Grafana — the dashboards are brilliant once you get them dialled in. I can see exactly when my 400W of Renogy panels are underperforming (usually when the neighbour's bloody extension starts shading them around 2pm in winter).

The setup wasn't totally painless. Getting the VE.Direct USB cable recognised reliably took a bit of fiddling with udev rules, but there's decent documentation out there and the Victron community forum filled in the gaps.

What I'm logging:

• SOC and voltage trends across my Fogstar Drift 200Ah LiFePO4
• Solar yield vs consumption daily/weekly
• Inverter load patterns (useful for spotting parasitic draws)

One thing I'd flag — run the Pi off a decent UPS or at least a stable 5V supply from your battery system. I had two SD card corruptions before I sorted the power side out. Now running it off a small Victron Phoenix 12/375 with a regulated supply and it's been rock solid.

Anyone else gone down this route? Curious whether others are using Node-RED as middleware or going straight into Grafana. Also wondering if anyone's bothered with the VRM portal alongside local logging or ditched it entirely.

@TonyLee yeah been doing something similar for about a year. Running a Pi Zero 2W rather than a full Pi 4 — way lower power draw which matters when you're watching every watt.

I've got mine pulling data via MQTT from the Cerbo and dumping it into InfluxDB + Grafana. The battery charge/discharge curves are dead useful for spotting if your Fogstar cells are drifting out of balance.

One tip — set your Grafana alerts to ping you if SOC drops below a threshold overnight. Caught a parasitic drain I hadn't noticed for weeks.

What are you using to store the data long term? SD card wear is a real concern on these things, I moved to a small USB SSD pretty sharpish.

Been running a similar setup for two years now. One thing neither of you have mentioned — SD card failure. Lost three months of logging data when my card died last winter. Moved everything to a proper SSD via USB and haven't looked back. A decent Samsung 870 Evo costs peanuts compared to the headache of losing your historical data.

Also worth noting: if you're pulling data via VE.Direct to USB rather than direct Cerbo network integration, you'll occasionally get dropouts during Victron firmware updates. Caught me out more than once.

@OllieThompson73 the Zero 2W is fine until you want to run InfluxDB + Grafana locally — then it gets painful. The Pi 4 handles it without breaking a sweat.

@VitoProject this is the thing nobody warns you about when you start down this rabbit hole. Killed two cards myself before moving the root filesystem to a USB SSD on my Pi 4. Night and day difference for reliability.

For the actual logging stack I'm running InfluxDB + Grafana locally — gives me proper dashboards showing my Fogstar 200Ah battery state across the shepherd's hut and garden office circuits side by side. Worth the setup time.

One tip: set your InfluxDB write interval to something sensible like 60s rather than the default — hammering the card every 5s is probably what's killing them in the first place.

The Victron VRM portal is handy but having your own local instance means you're not dependent on their servers or your internet connection, which matters when you're off-grid properly.

@VitoProject @DefenderLife had exactly this problem on my motorhome setup — bouncing around on rough roads doesn't help either, constant vibration is brutal on SD cards.

Switched to a USB SSD boot drive on my Pi 4 about a year ago, no SD involved at all. Night and day for reliability. Small Samsung T7 tucked away nicely.

Also worth mentioning — if you're running InfluxDB + Grafana locally, point your write paths to the SSD not any tmpfs mounts or you'll confuse yourself when the dashboards go blank after a reboot.

Data's been solid since. Grafana dashboards showing my Victron BMV-712 and MPPT history going back months now, proper useful for spotting patterns over winter.