HA for RV or Marine Use

Hardware
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HA has been working so well at home, I want the same thing for my boat. I’m sure RV folks have the same thoughts. I searched and only found a couple of threads along these lines, and not a lot of detail.

Surely someone else must be doing this, or at least thinking about it.

Obviously one big issue is running everything off 12VDC. I can easily power the RPi from a DC-DC converter. I have some battery powered Zigbee sensors which would be great. Some 12VDC relays (contactors) connected to GPIO pins would give me info on what’s running and what’s not.

Another issue is battery drain. I could leave the RPi running without too much problem, but if I wanted to, say, use some sort of smart switches for all my lights, that would be a large parasitic load. There are 12 ceiling fixtures alone.

Of course, there are other sensors which would be great to integrate. Devices which show the interior temperature of the fridge. Tank levels. Navigation light configuration. The list goes on.

The holy grail would be interfacing with the on-board navigation equipment, using the marine industry flavor of CANBus, called NMEA 2000.

Obviously this would be connected to a local IP network, which in turn could connect to the internet various ways (cellular network, marina WiFi, or even satellite.)

And I’ve never played with the HA “Map” page. Can that take GPS input to show your “home” moving around?

There are probably a hundred other questions I don’t even know to ask yet.

Anyone?

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For your light control, did you think about 433Mhz?

There are relay receivers that draw standby currents in the mA range at 12 volts, so not too much drain on your house batteries.

The issue would be ensuring that they were compatible with say the Sonoff 433Mhz bridge, or whatever device you would use to interface with HA.

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My current boat is too small (22 ft) to automate anything. However, the RV (travel trailer, caravan, camper, etc) Is perfect for it. Last week I received a 8Gb RPi 4 and am waiting on an SSD, and a pile of parts from China to start automation everything. My RV is new, but came with all manual switches instead of the factory automation like on some of them these days. I really wanted to try hacking on of those but it will still be fun to build my own.

I’ll start simple by replacing the factory “convenience center” with a wall mount tablet, and a bank of relays to switch those items. After that I’ll start experimenting with HVAC controls, light dimming, touch switches, awning automation, auto-leveling, etc.

Terry

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HI,

I have a setup in my RV running. I went “2-stages”.

  • 1st-stage is basic stuff like lights on, water pump etc.
  • 2nd-stage is fancy stuff/automations like water heating off automatically after 30min; water pump of when going to bed, …

Stage 1 I did with an ESP32. Works with little energy consumption. Stage 2 I do with an rPi. I can decide to have comfort (automation) and more energy consumption, or less comfort and longer life of the grid.

I need to see how this works. 1st long ride is going to start 4 weeks from now.

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We live full-time in our RV and have been building out more and more home automation based around Home Assistant over the past 2 years. It’s working really well, and recently I’ve begun sharing more details about it on our blog:

I’ve had great success using the Sonoff SV modules to control our 12V appliances - e.g. lights. There are several other components in the system too, including a full integration with our Victron-based electrical system using MQTT, and some custom Arduino 433MHz receivers (although I’m looking to migrate these to rtl_433).

As for location, our Pepwave MAX BR1 router can dump GPS data onto port 10110/tcp. I’m receiving that in NodeRED, parsing it and then calling homeassistant.set_location to update the latitude and longitude. This works really well! Only thing I haven’t solved for yet is automatically updating the timezone.

Happy to help more if I can!

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For the signalK server there is meanwhile an add-on for mqtt Home Assistant interface.
I am actually planning to do that.
I will have 1 Raspberry for HA and 1 Raspberry with MCS (Marine Control Server) by GEDAD to grab all NMEA data and 1-wire sensors to distribute them via SignalK Server.
Navigation at chart table by free navigational AVNav Software.

Regards
Liese

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I want to do automated dimmable light control for my RV lights which are all switched at the light source. Had anybody automated this? What about 12v smart light switches?

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A while back I scketched up a plan that is on my computer, packed up on a boat as part of it’s journey from Japan to DC…However, I plan to rewire my RV lights and switches all together.

Short story, I plan to pull cat5 lines to the existing light switch panels to allow for a multitude of data and control functions, capabilities, and expansion for things such as touch capacitance switches with backlighting and status indicators, addition of neopixels, etc…they would then all connect to relay/resistor boards near the fuse panel and master control would be done through a microprocessor connected to the HA RasPi. The actual light fixtures would be replaced with an LED fixture of sorts and controlled directly from the relay or digitally controlled resistor boards for the lights we would want to be dimmable as selected through HA or the wall switch.

I won’t kid myself and say it’s going to be an easy project, but the reality is that once it’s done, we will have the ability to really track and control power consumption and set scenes that allow us to limit/lock out what can be used during low battery states, weather, or limited shore power conditions.

Anything is possible, just have to think past the current existing…ask the ‘what if’ and detour the obstacles.

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Wondering if you are running your water, grey, and black tank sensors with Home Assistant to view on the dashboard. And if you are, how did you wire is up and integrate it into Home Assistant.

Thank you,

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I just stumbled upon something new from Shelly, and thought that would be a great piece for an RV or marine use. Check it out, it’s the Shelly Uni.

It runs on 12V to 36V, has an ADC (great for measuring battery/solar power) and you can connect up to three sensors for humidity, temp or whatever.

I ordered one to play around, mostly to get a cheap battery monitor for car and motorcycle. :smiley:

Might be interesting for you guys, too. :slight_smile:

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Nice! I can see lots of uses for these. Not just on the boat. If I’d known about these when I was setting up my heating system monitoring at home, I’d have used a few of these instead of 24VAC relays and GPIO pins. Let us know how it goes!

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:slight_smile: They were introduced in June '20 and are available for around two months. In Germany they aren’t even listed in any shop. :wink: I ordered them directly from Shelly, as soon as I get my hands on one, I’ll report back.

It sounds very interesting (and promising). :slight_smile:

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Hmm, hadn’t gotten that far in the planning but great thought, and will need to work this out a bit more. Since the tanks have different wire sensors (one ground for reach LED), that would be easy to code with waiting the input pins. I could use Node-red to setup an alarm parameter for the different statuses. More to come on this one.

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I have yet to purchase tank senders of any kind, so any suggestions on which type will be easiest to integrate?

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Hello,

I have those connected to the victron venus gx and via MQTT pushed into HA.

https://www.philippi-online-shop.de/de/bordueberwachung1/tankgeber.html

Best Regards.
Ralf

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16

Hi,
I have just finished my 1st tank level sensor
Open boat projects - DIY Ultra Sonic Level Sensor
The Open Boat Project team (https://open-boat-projects.org/) created meanwhile a lot of ideas and is actually developing a DIY Multifunction Display - really interesting.
Support is available via german (english speaking welcome :slight_smile: ) forum - www.segel-forum.de - .
The tank level sensors consist basically of a WEMOS D1 (<10EUR) with a Power Supply Shield (<10EUR) and the Sensor (approx 15 EUR, if i remember from Ali).
I managed to get the sensor sending NMEA0183 messages , which I do receive in a SignalK Server or in a free Navigation Software AVNav (also on open boat projects) running on a raspberry.
It is still to be placed on board and operation to be checked in real environment.
I plan to install it below a triangular plastic water tank in the front of the boat and below a stainless steel rectangular black water tank (2mm, stainless steel).

Regards;
Joerg

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Nice!!! A reasonably-priced tank level sensor is sort of the holy grail of boating.

I have 7 tanks (four fuel, two waste, one potable water) and upgrading to any of the existing commercial products is prohibitively expensive. An inexpensive DIY solution, especially one with NMEA output, would be a game-changer. I don’t speak German, but just skimming those pages and the pdf I downloaded from them has gotten my interest. I’m going to want to come back and spend some quality time with Google Translate and this information. Thanks!!

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Be careful :slight_smile:
With this project I started my Wemos/Arduino experience…
I had no experience and received very good support via the Open-boat-Project group I do know from the forum.
So far , I heared that some guys who started the topic did make poor experiences with i.e. cylindrical tanks. All success news came - so far - from prototypes with plastic / steel buckets at home.
The 1st real life feedback will come probably next summer.

Btw You can post in english as well in the Segeln-Forum.de - people will be glad to help.

Regards,
Jörg

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Hi Patrick
How to did you get on with using Shelly Uni as battery monitor?
cheers
Bruce

20

Shelly has a wiring diagram on their site for how to wire up the Uni to use the ADC as a battery monitor (see pic below). I put one inline between my battery and a fuse block, and it’s been great.

image