Feature request: GX-to-GX bridging so remote VE.Direct devices appear on a master GX

Been thinking about this one for a while, particularly after spending last summer rewiring the electrical system on my 38-foot narrowboat.

The boat has a Cerbo GX managing the main domestic bank — Victron MultiPlus, Fogstar lithium, the usual setup. But I've also got a completely separate bow thruster and windlass circuit with its own SmartShunt and a couple of solar controllers tucked away in the forward cabin. Running VE.Direct cables the full length of the boat just isn't practical — we're talking 12+ metres through awkward bilge spaces.

What I ended up doing was bodging a second Cerbo into the forward section and running everything over the boat's existing NMEA backbone. It works, but it's messy to monitor. I'm essentially flicking between two VRM dashboards to get a complete picture of the vessel.

What I'd love to see is some kind of GX-to-GX bridging — where a slave Cerbo's connected devices surface cleanly on a master unit's overview. One VRM dashboard, one DVCC authority, everything visible from the saloon panel.

I imagine this would be genuinely useful beyond boats too. Anyone running a garden office with its own Cerbo alongside a house system will know the frustration of fragmented monitoring.

Has anyone found a workable workaround beyond the dual-dashboard situation? I've had a poke around with Node-RED pulling data between instances but it feels like duct tape.

Curious whether others — especially anyone on larger narrowboats or multi-building setups — have hit the same wall. Would this feature request get your vote?

@CallumHobbs mate, as a fellow narrowboater I feel this in my soul — nothing says "fun afternoon" like crawling through a 38-footer trying to figure out why your Cerbo thinks the bow solar controller is on holiday. 🚢

Victron's ecosystem is brilliant until your boat is longer than their cable runs care to admit. GX-to-GX bridging would basically be VE.Bus over TCP done properly, which they're clearly capable of but seemingly saving for a rainy day (or a very long narrowboat).

Someone on Victron Community suggested using a RPi running Venus OS as a relay node — bodge, but it works if you enjoy that sort of suffering.

@CallumHobbs this maps almost exactly to what I've been wanting for my emergency backup setup — I've got a secondary Cerbo on a completely isolated critical-loads panel, and getting both to present as a unified system in VRM is genuinely painful right now.

Worth noting that Victron's MQTT layer on the GX already exposes essentially everything needed for this — the data model is there, it's really a question of whether they'll implement a proper master/subordinate topology at firmware level rather than bodging it through third-party Node-RED flows.

The narrowboat use-case is a strong argument because it's a documented Victron market segment, not a niche edge case. If you haven't already, I'd raise this directly on the Victron Community forum — they do actually read feature requests there, particularly when accompanied by a well-reasoned technical use-case rather than just "it'd be nice."

@CallumHobbs this resonates with my shepherd's hut setup — I've got a secondary cabin about 40m away and running VE.Direct cable that distance is just not happening practically.

What I'd really want from GX bridging is proper read/write not just monitoring — so you can actually control charge limits on the remote unit from the master. Read-only telemetry is half a solution.

Victron's MQTT implementation is already doing some of this work under the hood, so it feels like the building blocks are there. More of a firmware/software decision than a hardware limitation from what I can tell.

Anyone tried the Node-RED workaround on a Cerbo? Seen a few threads suggesting you can bodge something together but it's clearly not the same as native support.

@CallumHobbs this is something I'd genuinely use too. My setup is land-based but I've got a Cerbo in the main cabin and a second one in the workshop/battery shed about 25m away — same problem, two separate islands in VRM that should logically be one system.

The thing I'd add to your feature request: read-only vs read-write permissions for bridged devices. Sometimes you want the master GX to see everything on the secondary but not accidentally push incorrect charge parameters across. Particularly relevant on a boat where the domestic and engine bank have very different profiles.

Victron's MQTT implementation is already doing some of the heavy lifting here — feels like this shouldn't be an enormous architectural leap for them. Whether it's on their roadmap is another matter entirely.