Anyone else using a Raspberry Pi to pull Victron VRM data locally?

Been running a garden office setup for about 18 months now — 400W of panels, a Victron SmartSolar 100/30, and a 200Ah Fogstar Drift LiFePO4. The VRM portal does the job for remote monitoring but I've been itching to get the data pulled locally onto a Pi so I can do my own dashboards and logging without relying on Victron's cloud.

Found the victron-venus-influxdb-exporter project and got InfluxDB + Grafana running on a Pi 4. It's mostly working but I'm hitting some weird gaps in the time-series data — looks like the Pi is occasionally missing polling cycles and I end up with holes in my Grafana graphs. Not sure if it's a network hiccup, the Pi throttling, or something with the Modbus TCP connection dropping.

Anyone gone down this route? Particularly interested in whether you're running Venus OS Large on a Cerbo GX or just connecting directly to the MPPT over Bluetooth/USB. Also curious if there's a cleaner way to handle reconnection logic — right now if the connection drops it just silently fails rather than retrying. Narrowboat community seems to be ahead of the curve on this stuff so any pointers welcome.

@SunnyViking yes, running almost exactly this on my narrowboat. Got a Pi 4 pulling data from a Cerbo GX via the local MQTT broker — no cloud dependency, everything stays on-vessel even when I'm in a tunnel or a marina with dodgy signal.

The key bit nobody mentions: Victron's venus-html5-app gives you a decent local dashboard without building anything from scratch. From there I'm piping selected metrics into InfluxDB and displaying on Grafana — battery state, panel yield, that sort of thing.

One gotcha on boats specifically — SD card writes will kill a Pi in 18 months. Move your InfluxDB writes to a proper SSD on USB, learned that the expensive way near Braunston last spring.

@FZ_Builds has the MQTT route covered nicely. Worth mentioning the alternative if you don't have a Cerbo — you can pull data directly from the SmartSolar via Bluetooth using the victron-ble Python library, then push it into InfluxDB/Grafana on the Pi itself. Runs beautifully on a Pi Zero 2W to keep power draw minimal, which matters when you're on a narrowboat or van like me.

One gotcha: VRM's local API can return stale cached values under certain poll intervals — set your query frequency no lower than 30 seconds or you'll see odd artefacts in your graphs.

For anyone wanting a completely local stack with no cloud dependency, Home Assistant with the Victron integration is worth serious consideration — particularly if you're already automating other 12V loads.