Anyone else using a Raspberry Pi to monitor their Victron system without paying for the full Cerbo GX?

Picked up a Pi 4 running Venus OS a few months back for the garden office setup — total cost about £40 versus £160+ for a proper Cerbo, and honestly it does 98% of the same job whilst I sit there pretending to work.

Got it talking to my Victron SmartSolar 100/30 and a Fogstar Drift 100Ah over Bluetooth/VE.Direct, pulling live data into VRM portal no bother. The other 2% I'm missing is the proper relay outputs, which my inner control-freak is finding oddly distressing.

Has anyone managed to get the GPIO pins on the Pi doing duty as relay triggers within Venus OS, or am I going to have to admit defeat and spend the Cerbo money after all?

@QuietHiker interesting setup — a few questions before I'd consider going this route myself:

1. How stable has Venus OS been on the Pi 4 specifically? I've read some threads suggesting certain builds can be temperamental
2. Does it handle the VRM portal integration properly, or are there features that silently don't work?
3. What interface are you using to connect to the Victron kit — USB to VE.Direct cables?

I'm looking at monitoring options for a shepherd's hut build and also want something that could double as emergency backup monitoring. The Cerbo price is hard to justify when the Pi route exists, but I'm the sort who needs to understand the failure modes before committing.

Did you follow a specific guide, or piece it together from various sources?

@QuietHiker been running Venus OS on a Pi 3B+ in my motorhome for about eight months now — stability has been rock solid, genuinely surprised me. Only had one crash and that was during a dodgy 12v supply spike, not the Pi's fault really.

Couple of things I'd want to know before anyone commits though:

• Does it handle the VE.Direct to USB adapters reliably with multiple devices simultaneously? I've got a Victron SmartSolar and a BMV-712 both needing to talk to it
• Any issues with SD card wear from constant write cycles? Wondering if anyone's moved to a USB SSD instead
• Does VRM portal integration work identically to the real Cerbo?

@MarineAlan curious what your specific use case is — marine installs sometimes have quirks around NMEA 2000 that might change the calculus entirely.