Anyone else using a Victron Cerbo GX with non-Victron kit — how are you handling the gaps in monitoring?

Just finished wiring up my van build and I've got a Cerbo GX as the brains of the system. Most of it is Victron — Multiplus 2, SmartSolar MPPT 150/35, and a pair of 200Ah lithium cells with a Daly BMS. The problem is the Cerbo talks beautifully to the Victron gear over VE.Can and VE.Direct, but the Daly BMS is basically invisible to it. I can see state of charge and voltage on the BMS's own Bluetooth app, but nothing feeds through to VRM or the Cerbo dashboard.

I've been looking at the Victron SmartShunt as a workaround — stick it on the negative bus and let it do its own SOC calculation feeding directly into the Cerbo. That would at least give me battery monitoring in one place. But it feels a bit redundant having both a BMS and a shunt both trying to track SOC independently. Has anyone actually run this setup and found it reliable, or does the SmartShunt drift badly over time without a proper BMS handshake?

The other option I've seen mentioned is a Raspberry Pi running Venus OS with some custom Node-RED flows to pull data from the Daly over RS485 and push it into the Cerbo, but honestly that sounds like a rabbit hole I might not come back out of. Anyone gone down that route and actually got it stable long-term?

@Ben1973 sounds like a solid build! The gap you're hitting is pretty common — the Cerbo is brilliant within the Victron ecosystem but starts showing its limits the moment you introduce third-party kit.

For non-Victron BMS comms, I've had decent results using a Raspberry Pi running Node-RED alongside the Cerbo, pulling data via MQTT and pushing custom values back into the GX using the "dbus-mqtt" service. Lets you bodge in almost any BMS that has serial or CAN output and have it display natively on the VRM dashboard.

Worth also checking whether your BMS manufacturer has a specific Victron integration — Daly and JK both have community-written drivers floating about on the Victron community forum that can save you a fair bit of head-scratching.

What BMS model are you running exactly? Might be able to point you somewhere more specific.

@Ben1973 interesting one — I've got a similar situation in my static caravan where the Cerbo plays nicely with all the Victron bits but anything outside that ecosystem feels like it's been deliberately ignored 😅

Quick question though: are you using the Cerbo's digital inputs at all? I've been pondering whether you can bodge in some basic state monitoring for non-Victron gear that way — not pretty, but potentially functional?

Also wondering whether your BMS has a UART or RS485 output rather than CANbus? Might open up more options depending on the brand. What BMS are you actually running with those cells? Some of the cheaper ones (looking at you, JK BMS) have surprisingly decent integration options that aren't immediately obvious from the documentation.

Basically asking because I'm about to spec something similar for a cabin project and want to avoid the same headaches.

@Ben1973 Fogstar cells with a third-party BMS is basically the Cerbo's kryptonite — mine throws a tantrum if anything isn't speaking proper VE.Can or VE.Direct, so I bodged it with a Raspberry Pi running Venus OS large and a Victron-compatible shunt on the battery side, which at least gives you proper SOC without the BMS politics. The Node-RED flows on Venus OS large are genuinely your best mate here for bridging gaps — you can pull MQTT data from almost anything and display it as if it were native Victron kit. Not pretty under the bonnet but the dashboard doesn't know that.

@Ben1973 ran into exactly this with my build — Fogstar cells, Daly BMS, Cerbo doing its best impression of a brick. The workaround that actually helped me was using a Raspberry Pi running Venus OS Large alongside the Cerbo, which lets you pull MQTT data from the BMS via a serial adapter and at least get SOC and cell voltages into VRM. Not pretty, but it works.

Alternatively if you're wedded to keeping it simple, the Victron SmartShunt handles the SOC side independently and integrates natively — it won't give you cell-level data but at least the Cerbo stops pretending your battery doesn't exist.

Worth checking whether your specific Daly model has a supported driver in Venus OS — the list has grown a fair bit recently.