daniel
Victron has a nice monitoring and touch display system in their GX line. The latest iterations can nicely visualize the power flow in your system and may other things like showing tank levels and controlling relays. You can also modify some basic perimeters with this display like your shore power input current limit.
The most common GX for a RV is the Cerbo GX it can be paired with a Touch 50 or the new Touch 70 to add a 5″ or 7″ touch display. It can be accessed via a web browser and it also ties back to Victron VRM so your information and system can be accessed from any internet connection. A Cerbo GX and Touch 70 costs over $600. If you have a bit of IT knowledge you can build a similar system for a fraction of the cost. The Cerbo GX includes many interfaces that the rPi does not which is nice.
My build will use a Raspberry Pi 3B+ running Victron’s Venus OS. The newer revisions of the rPi 4 have an issue booting Venus OS at the current time (Oct 2021). The rPi 3B+ has wired and wireless networking, bluetooth, and four USB ports.
The display I am using is the official 7″ raspberry pi touch display. You could use a generic HDMI/USB touch display but they don’t support the display dimming and sleep like the Victron touch and rpi display do.
To install Venus OS I followed the wiki at https://github.com/victronenergy/venus/wiki. I also enabled some useful modifications by kwindrem.
- https://github.com/kwindrem/SetupHelper – Enables easy install and upgrade of modifications. Start here.
- https://github.com/kwindrem/RpiDisplaySetup – Sets up Venus OS to use the official rpi display
- https://github.com/kwindrem/GuiMods – Add a menu item and several mods and enhancements that can be made to the display
- https://github.com/kwindrem/ShutdownMonitor – Adds a shutdown option to the menu
Costs ~ $220
- Raspberry Pi 3 B+ $35
- 7″ Touch Display $60
- 32GB microSD
- VE.Direct to USB (Smart Shut and Smart Solar MPPT connectivity) 2x $28 You can DIY these cables for cheaper
- Mk3 VE.Bus to USB for both configuring the Multiplus and connecting to the rPi $57
- 12v to 5v 3a Buck converter to power the rPi $10
