Total mess on a remote mountain shelter installation

[thanar (Thanos Tourtouras)]

I have installed a Victron system using a rPi on a remote mountain shelter, along with a complete DC-voltage grid that’s running along the whole building used for lighting, ventilation and devices charging, free of charge. The shelter is located 90min from the closest proper settlement, so we thought it would be a good idea to have the system connected to VRM in order to detect any urgencies in time. This is a super-minimal set up, just two panels vertical on the southern wall, a BlueSolar MPPT controller and a heated lithium battery.

However, it’s been giving me headaches. I am suspecting the a possible incompatibility or some strange network issue is at play here. The site is connected to the internet through a typical 5G router and the rPi is connected to the router through WiFi, since the two devices are across the hall.

The rPi used is a model B+ unit, and both WiFi and Bluetooth worked perfectly upon setting up VenusOS on it.

However, something seems to be off regarding its connectivity. As seen on the attached image, the system thinks it is offline; ethernet is indeed unplugged, however the WiFi was connected to the hotspot while I was on location and since the device as been kind of online.

Selecting “connect” on the WiFi setting does nothing, and of course I wouldn’t select to “forget” the WiFi network, since that would expectedly cut me off completely.

I guess that due to this connectivity mess, the system date/time is way off (12 days back) and also thinks it has also been 12 days since it connected to the VRM, although it is clear that I’m online through the console right now remotely! I can find no way to manually adjust the system time on the device. However “local time” on the VRM is correct.

I am also suspecting this connectivity issue has something to do with the other issues I am facing on this installation, where I often see gaps on the advanced graphs and general VRM information. I understand that the gx_device would keep local records of the VRM data during a network outage, in order for it to be transmitter later.

Available “internal storage” according to remote console is over 5GB, which would be enough for at least a few days’ worth of network outage, imho.

Actual free “disk space” on the device is even higher, around 23GB, according to df when run locally through ssh. Please disregard “-500 records” on last screenshot, it’s back to zero now.

How should I proceed, except from going up there and setting everything up from scratch?

[thanar (Thanos Tourtouras)]

Since I got @guystewart 's attention with him moving the post into the modifications, I completely re-wrote the original post, with lots of additional information, since I am suspecting there’s some strange connectivity issue here at play, or some incompatibility with the rPi used, although it’s a supposedly supported model, @mpvader please let me know if anyone from the team would like to take a closer (albeit still remote) look.

[thanar (Thanos Tourtouras)]

OK, just found out that if I switch the GUI to the old version, WiFi reports as “connected”!

[thanar (Thanos Tourtouras)]

I’ve reached to the conclusion that most problems I am facing with this installation have to do with the fact that the NEW UI seems to loose track on internet connectivity.

Since I switched to the OLD UI, most issues are now gone, just like magic:

1. WiFi reports as connected
2. Manually adjusted time now is keeping up
3. offline VRM records update to the cloud fine

I believe there is stuff the team should have a look at on my case, please reach to me privately in order to share credentials to the installation, on tell me in which other way this can be done.