Anyone else using a Raspberry Pi to monitor their Victron setup, or am I just making life hard for myself?

Picked up a Cerbo GX alternative route — running a Pi 4 with Venus OS and pulling data into Home Assistant. Costs about £60 all-in versus £200+ for the official Cerbo, which is the kind of maths that gets me out of bed in the morning.

Got it talking to my Victron MultiPlus-II and a pair of Fogstar 200Ah LiFePO4 batteries over VE.Bus and VE.Direct. The MQTT feed into HA is mostly solid, but I'm getting the occasional dropout every few days that requires a service restart — not ideal when you're trying to catch overnight charging behaviour on a 4kW array.

Anyone cracked a reliable watchdog script for this, or is the Cerbo actually worth the premium for the stability alone?

Been running almost exactly this setup for about 18 months now, @WayneKnight. The Venus OS image for Pi is surprisingly solid — Victron clearly don't mind people using it, which is refreshing.

One thing worth mentioning that you might not have hit yet: keep an eye on your SD card. Running continuously it'll wear out faster than you'd expect. Either grab a decent SanDisk Endurance card or, better yet, boot from a USB SSD — made a noticeable difference to reliability on mine.

The MQTT integration into Home Assistant is where it really sings. Once you've got live battery state, solar yield and load data feeding into dashboards and automations, going back to a basic display feels like a step backwards.

That £140 saving buys a fair bit of extra capacity elsewhere too. 👍

Great thread! I went down this exact rabbit hole last winter. One thing worth mentioning that neither @WayneKnight nor @Thommo53 have touched on — the Pi runs noticeably warmer than a dedicated Cerbo, so if yours is in a confined battery enclosure, slap a small heatsink on it at minimum. I've also found the Node-RED integration on top of Venus OS genuinely useful for automating grid tie-in schedules based on weather forecasts. Takes a weekend to get your head around but once it clicks, you won't go back. The £140 saving is real, though I'd argue the flexibility is actually the bigger win. Just make sure you're on a decent quality SD card or, better yet, boot from USB — had one card fail on me after about eight months and lost my config. Lesson learned the hard way!

Worth adding — the bit that caught me out initially was the MK3-USB interface for talking to the Victron kit. Easy to overlook when you're budgeting the £60 all-in figure, because that dongle adds another ~£30 on top.

Also, if you're pulling data into Home Assistant, the Victron MQTT integration is rock solid once you've enabled the broker on Venus OS. I've got automations set off it for my garden office — cuts the EV charger load when the battery drops below a certain SOC, which has been genuinely useful through winter.

One gotcha: SD card wear. Running Venus OS off a decent industrial-grade card (or better, a small SSD on USB) makes a real difference to longevity. Lost one setup to a dead card after about eight months before I wised up.

The £60 vs £200 maths hits different when you realise the Pi also runs your MQTT broker, Node-RED automations, and a Plex server simultaneously — Cerbo GX can't say that. 🫡