Anyone else using a Raspberry Pi to monitor their Victron system or is it overkill?

Been running a Pi 4 on my garden office setup for about 18 months now and honestly it's transformed how I understand the system. Connected it to my Victron Cerbo via the local API and pulling everything into Home Assistant — battery SOC, solar yield, grid fallback usage, the lot.

Is it overkill? Probably on paper. But once you've got proper historical data and custom alerts (I get a notification if SOC drops below 20% overnight), going back to just the VRM portal feels like flying blind.

A few things worth mentioning if you're considering it:

• VenusOS on the Pi itself is an option if you don't want to faff about with the Cerbo — essentially turns the Pi into a GX device
• The MQTT broker built into VenusOS makes Home Assistant integration surprisingly painless
• A Pi Zero 2W works fine if you want low power draw — my full Pi 4 pulls more than I'd like on a tight battery budget

The main gotcha is keeping everything updated and making sure your SD card doesn't corrupt. Moved mine to USB boot after losing a card — classic lesson everyone seems to learn the hard way.

Curious whether anyone else is using Node-RED flows alongside this? I've got some basic automation set up but feel like I'm barely scratching the surface. Also interested if anyone's integrated Fogstar battery BMS data into the same dashboard — feels like the missing piece for me right now.

Not overkill at all — it's basically a Cerbo GX for people who enjoy suffering at 2am reading Python stack traces.

I've got a Pi 3B+ pulling data from my Multiplus II and feeding it into Grafana. The graphs are genuinely prettier than anything my energy supplier's app produces. My partner now checks the battery state

ForestWanderer | Posts: 847 | Location: Scottish Borders

Ha, @CotswoldNomad that's painfully accurate 😄

I've been running a Pi Zero 2W for monitoring my off-grid cabin setup for about eight months. Pulls data from the Victron via VE.Direct cable directly into InfluxDB, then Grafana dashboards for visualisation. Genuinely game-changing for understanding seasonal patterns — I can see exactly when my battery cycling behaviour changes heading into October.

The real win for me was spotting a failing cell in my lithium bank early because the charge curves looked slightly off. Paid for the whole setup in one catch.

Total cost was under £40 including the VE.Direct USB cable. If that's overkill, I'll take it! Main faff was getting the serial permissions sorted on Raspbian — happy to share my config if anyone wants it.

KeithWebb | Posts: 312 | Location: North Yorkshire Dales

Been doing exactly this for about eight months — fully worth it in my opinion. One thing nobody mentions is using Node-RED alongside the Pi rather than writing Python scripts from scratch. Drag-and-drop flows, connects to Victron's MQTT broker beautifully, and you're not staring at stack traces at midnight @CotswoldNomad 😄

I've got mine pushing data into InfluxDB with Grafana dashboards on top, so I can see battery trends across weeks rather than just what's happening right now. That historical view genuinely changed how I sized my loads through winter.

Only gotcha — make sure your Pi has a decent UPS hat or at least a supercapacitor setup, otherwise a power event corrupts your SD card and you're starting from scratch. Ask me how I know...

BevJackson64 | Posts: 156 | Location: Array

Interested in this for my motorhome setup — currently running a Victron Multiplus-II with a Fogstar Drift 200Ah battery. Few questions before I commit:

1. Does the Pi need to be permanently powered, or can it sleep and wake when the Cerbo has something to report?
2. What's the typical idle draw — even 2-3W continuous adds up on a touring setup
3. Does the local Victron API still function when there's no internet connection, or does it need to phone home?

@KeithWebb — you mentioned it's fully working after eight months, but have you had any stability issues in cold weather? My motorhome can sit at sub-zero overnight in winter and I'm wondering whether the SD card takes a beating.

Would a Pi Zero 2W be sufficient or is a Pi 4 genuinely needed for this use case?