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

Been running a Pi 4 with Venus OS large on it for about 18 months now, pulling data from my Victron MPPT and Multiplus via a VE.Direct USB cable. Absolutely transformed how I understand the shepherd's hut system.

The thing that sold me was local data sovereignty — I didn't want to rely on Victron's cloud servers for historical logging. With InfluxDB and Grafana sitting on the same Pi, I've got every voltage spike and SOC dip logged locally since day one. Brilliant for spotting patterns, like realising my Fogstar batteries were hitting absorption voltage far later in the day during November than I'd assumed.

A few things worth knowing if you're just starting out:

• Venus OS large turns the Pi into a proper GX device — it's not just data scraping, it actually becomes part of the system
• The MQTT broker built into Venus is incredibly useful if you want to pipe data elsewhere
• SD card longevity is a genuine concern — worth running the OS from a USB SSD instead

The Grafana dashboards take a weekend to get right but once they're done you'll be obsessed. Mine shows a rolling 30-day view of solar yield against weather data I pull from the Met Office API. Slightly overkill for a shepherd's hut, perhaps, but deeply satisfying.

Anyone else gone down this rabbit hole? Curious whether others are using Node-RED for automations on top — I've been tempted to set up automatic load shedding when SOC drops below 20% but haven't committed yet.

@SolarNeil Nice cliffhanger there — "understand the shepherd's..." the shepherd's what? Pie? Delight? Ancient wisdom?

Assuming you meant your system rather than a local farmer, yes I'm doing something similar on my garden office setup. Pi 4 running Venus OS large, pulling from a Victron SmartSolar 100/

Ha, @BrianBrown beat me to it — I was absolutely dying waiting to find out about the shepherd's something 😄

@SolarNeil assuming you meant "shepherd's hut" setup or similar, I'm running almost identical kit here. Pi 4 with Venus OS Large has been rock solid for me too. I'd add that pairing it with InfluxDB and Grafana for the dashboards is genuinely game-changing — you can spot patterns in your solar yield and battery behaviour that you'd never catch just glancing at a screen.

One tip: if you're not already doing it, set up automatic backups of your Venus OS config to a USB stick. Lost a month of settings once when an SD card died and it was a proper pain to rebuild. Learned that lesson the hard way!

What MPPT are you running out of curiosity?

@SolarNeil assuming that was meant to be "shepherd's hut" setup or possibly just an unfortunate autocorrect — either way, genuinely curious what monitoring stack you've ended up with on top of Venus OS Large.

I'm running a similar setup here: Pi 4 pulling from a Multiplus-II 48/5000 and a SmartSolar 150/45 via VE.Direct, then piping the MQTT feed into InfluxDB with Grafana on top. The granularity you get versus the basic Victron Connect app is night and day — I can see exactly what my Fogstar Drift 48V pack is doing cell-by-cell across charge cycles.

One thing worth mentioning for anyone setting this up: the VE.Direct to USB cables from Victron are worth buying genuine rather than cheaper alternatives. Had one dodgy third-party cable causing intermittent dropouts that took me weeks to diagnose.

@RetiredSquaddie yeah pretty obvious it's a shepherd's hut setup — I run mine the same way actually. Pi 4 with Venus OS Large pulling from a Victron MPPT 100/30 and a Multiplus-II. Game changer for spotting patterns, especially over winter when the hut isn't used much and you want to catch anything weird happening with the batteries.

Been using Node-RED on top to push alerts to my phone when SOC drops below 20%. Fogstar Drift cells so I'm a bit precious about them going too low 😅

The VE.Direct USB cables are solid but worth getting genuine ones — had a cheap knockoff cause all sorts of grief with dropouts before I swapped it.

@SolarNeil meanwhile the rest of us are on the edge of our seats wondering if it transformed how you understand the shepherd's collie or the shepherd's pie 🥧

Been running a similar setup in my static caravan — Pi 4 pulling VE.Direct data from my Victron SmartSolar, and honestly the graphs alone made me realise I'd had my panels facing slightly the wrong direction for eight months like an absolute muppet. The Fogstar batteries I've got are finally being treated properly now I can actually see what's happening rather than just squinting at the MPPT LEDs and hoping for the best.