Anyone else using a Raspberry Pi to monitor their Victron system?

Running a Pi 4 in my shepherd's hut hooked up to a Victron SmartSolar via VE.Direct cable, feeding into Node-RED and InfluxDB — because apparently just looking out the window at the sun wasn't good enough for me.

The setup's been surprisingly solid for about 18 months now. I've got Grafana dashboards showing SOC, panel yield, and battery voltage trends, which is genuinely useful for spotting when my Fogstar lithium cells are behaving oddly rather than just vibes-based troubleshooting.

A few things I've learned the hard way:

• Power the Pi properly — I had a dodgy USB-C supply browning out the Pi when the inverter kicked in. Absolute nightmare to diagnose.
• Venus OS Large on the Cerbo is slicker, I'll admit, but costs about 40x more than a Pi Zero 2W
• VE.Direct to USB cables from Victron are worth buying genuine — the knock-offs I tried first were... creative... in their interpretation of the protocol

The only real faff is keeping the Pi from corrupting the SD card during unexpected shutdowns. I've since moved the OS to a small SSD on a USB adapter and that's sorted it.

Anyone else gone further with automating responses — like Node-RED actually sending commands back to the MPPT rather than just watching it? I've been eyeing up the VE.Direct write commands but slightly terrified of accidentally telling my charge controller to do something catastrophic at 2am.

Also curious whether anyone's integrated weather forecast APIs to predict generation — feels like the kind of rabbit hole I'm already halfway down.

@Renogy_Nerd mate I've got the exact same setup on the narrowboat except I added a Grafana dashboard so I can watch my battery percentage drop in beautiful high-definition graphs whilst moored in a tunnel with zero solar.

Few tips from painful experience:

• Power the Pi from a stable 5V DC-DC converter off your 12V bus, not a cheap USB charger — learned that one the hard way when a voltage spike took out my first Pi
• Set up VictronConnect's VE.Direct baud rate to 19200 or you'll get garbage data
• Fogstar cells report beautifully into InfluxDB if you're running a DIY BMS alongside

The real flex is setting up push alerts to your phone when SOC drops below 20% — because nothing motivates you to find a sunny mooring faster than a notification at 2am.

@DevonNomad the Grafana dashboards are addictive aren't they — I spent an entire Saturday afternoon tweaking panel colours instead of, y'know, actually using the electricity I was monitoring.

One thing worth adding to the Pi setup: I run venus-docker alongside a small UPS hat so the Pi itself doesn't brown out during the exact low-voltage event you most want to capture. Nothing more useless than a monitoring system that dies when things get interesting.

Also worth pulling data from the VE.Bus if you've got a Multiplus — the DC side alone tells half the story. My InfluxDB retention policy keeps 90 days of 10-second samples before downsampling, which has been invaluable for diagnosing a dodgy Fogstar cell that was only misbehaving at 2am in January.

@Renogy_Nerd running almost identical on the narrowboat — VE.Direct into a Pi Zero 2W rather than the 4, draws barely anything which matters when you're watching every watt.

One thing worth adding to your stack: venus-docker or just flashing Venus OS Large directly onto the Pi. Cuts out a lot of the manual wiring between Node-RED and the Victron ecosystem, everything speaks MQTT natively then.

Also set up a simple Python script to push daily summaries to a Telegram bot — means I get a morning digest without needing Grafana open. Useful when you're away from the boat and want a quick sanity check on SOC without logging into a dashboard.

@TracyAllen the panel colour rabbit hole is real, lost a whole weekend to that myself 😅

@CaddyProject the Zero 2W is a smart call on the power draw front — I went full Pi 4 in my garden office and then had a small crisis when I realised my "monitoring system" was quietly hoovering watts 24/7.

Ended up putting the whole Pi stack on a separate small panel and a Fogstar 12V lithium just for the tech gear. Felt a bit mad at the time, a mini off-grid system within the off-grid system, but it means my main Victron data stays clean and the monitoring never goes dark even if I'm stress-testing the main bank.

The VE.Direct to USB adapter is doing the heavy lifting — rock solid for months now. Only faff was getting the Venus OS data through properly but once that clicked, the whole picture came together nicely.