Nice idea. I’m not likely to spend $300 on a Victron Cerbo GX just to get GPS into HA, unfortunately. But hey, if it helps anyone (including traffic to your site) it’s a good thing!
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@CaptTom It should also be possible without the Cerbo, too, I just wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to convert the serial data 
but if I figure it out, I’ll post an update!
@KevinE Thank you! I haven’t done anything with engine data yet, but planning to. I think it requires an extra YachtDevices chip to be able to get the data out / be able to read it properly
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@CaptTom I pull in GPS data into the HA in my RV using a $15 USB GPS receiver from Amazon. I installed gpsd and I’m using the HA gpsd integration. It was relatively easy and has been working great.
@KevinE I’m currently pulling in RV-C CANBUS data into my HA implementation. I’m planning on pulling chassis info into the HA system via a connection to the chassis J1939 port. I haven’t yet decided whether to connect a cable from the J1939 port to the HA system or use a ESP development board with a J1939 or ODB connector to read the data and forward the data to HA via MQTT.
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@flyboy, that’s great to hear about the ease of getting GPS data into HA.
Also, if you can get CANBUS data in, a similar process might work for NMEA2000 (marine electronics) data. That protocol is based on CANBUS.
This is exactly what I want to do. Would you be willing to share the flow that you use for Pepwave → set_location?
I also have a HomeAssistant instance running in my RV. I would like to get the associated weather information with the GPS position of the current location. Unfortunately, the coordinates are fixed in the met.no integration and are only taken over during installation. This is the current status and not an error. I have therefore set a feature request met.no follow home-location and would be pleased if you would vote for this feature.
I would be very interested in the implementation of the RV-C CANBUS in the HA system. Do you have any details on this?
Check out the CoachProxy repository. It a RPi solution with a CANBUS Hat which communicates with other devices on the RV-C network. While it uses NodeRed and not HA, its a good open source project for RV-C integration.
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Thank you very much for the link. A really interesting project, which admittedly makes me a little envious. Unfortunately, the standardisation of the RV components in Europe has been summarised in a project group CI-BUS - Caravaning since 2011. In the process, all members have to sign a confidentiality agreement, it is not wanted to publish the standardisations of the BUS communication. We will therefore have to wait a long time for open-source solutions comparable to those based on the RV-C communications protocol.
Same in the marine industry. They took CANBus and layered a proprietary protocol (NMEA 2000) on top, so no open-source projects could communicate with marine electronics devices. There’s been some hacking, and some movement toward an open standard called Signal-K. But of course no hardware manufacturers are supporting Signal-K. If you want to use it you pretty much have to roll your own navigation, monitoring and control systems.
It’s correct, battery monitoring doesn’t really make sense without current measurement. Unfortunately, in my research I didn’t find any proper off-the-shelf solutions that I could have used with HA. I therefore decided to develop my own. However, I don’t use shunts but open loop hall sensors that can easily be read out with ESP32. Thanks to ESPHome this can be used very well, the ADC support is very good and I can measure currents of up to 20A, 50A or 200A without a shunt. The accuracy is much better than 1 percent and thanks to the integration platform, the ESP already provides power (W / kW) and energy (Wh, kWh). The advantage is that you only have to put the cable through the sensor. This can also be installed very easily at a later stage.
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This whole N2K thing is such a pain in the ass. At least there is some continuous progress being made in reverse engineering PGNs, closed standards are just evil.
I still use NMEA0183 for most of the stuff on my boat. It’s not a bus and cabling can be a little tricky, but I don’t really have any high bandwidth requirements. It’s mostly GNSS, AIS, sounder and wind vane. 38.4k serial works well for that mostly, although it has a tendency to saturate in areas with lots of traffic due to AIS. But eh. And if you factor in the costs for N2K cabling and backbone equipment, the margins they make on that stuff are insane. And while NMEA0183 is still proprietary, it’s at least human readable ASCII and has been mostly reverse engineered.
Necro’ing an old comment so I appologize!
Did you ever end up replacing the convenience center?
Do you have a link to a hall sensor that would work?
I’m using a Hall open loop current sensor, model HKW22 with a current range of ±400 amps.
It should be possible to buy in Poland:
Hope, this helps you
I know you posted this a few years back, I’m hoping you’re still around on the boards. I’m looking at automating our park model camper and your video tour was my motivation for doing so.
I’m hoping you can provide some insight on how you wired the Sonoff SV’s. I’m just struggling to wrap my head around it. From what I can see, the switches themselves are a simple 2 wire 12v switch that when turned on sends 12v to the light fixture and when turned off interrupts power to the fixture.
Since the SV’s require ground I assume that means they must be installed up at the light fixture instead of down at the switch. But then how are you preventing the switch from cutting power to the SV? Even by swapping the on/off switch to a toggle would it not still be cutting power to the SV? Or are the SV’s powered by another power source?
That’s often the problem with these devices. You normally can’t have it both ways - using the physical switch and the wifi switch. But…
…the Sonoff SVs provide you with the possibility to run them off of an external power source (isolation mode). Take a look here:
*Picture taken from this website: https://www.expert4house.com/de/intelligentes-zuhause/smart-switch/sonoff-sv
And out of personal experience, Shelly has some devices as well, that work the same way, eg. the Shelly Uno (I think that was the name).
That’s the problem though, and part that I’m trying to wrap my head around, providing it an external power source. At the switch there is no ground, only 12v. At the light, there is ground but the 12v is the supplied from the switch so it’s interrupted.
So I could bridge the 12v at the switch to provide constant 12v at the light and have a power source, but then there’s only control through HA. So that’s definitely not how @mattknight did it.
The only thing I can think of is they created a new ground at each switch or fished one from another location, split the constant 12v wire so 1 can be used as the power supply and the other goes to the switch, then the switch could trigger the relay. But that sounds like a major PITA. Fishing wires in an RV is not a simple task at all.
Maybe I get lost in translation here, but isn’t a RV a recreational vehicle, in Germany we call that a “Camper”. In the end it’s a car, don’t you have ground on every metal part of the chassis?
I’m not a car electrian, but I honestly did my fare share in electrical repairs in cars over the last thirty years, ground is always only a few centimeters away. Can’t you pull a line from the next chassis part? You don’t need to have a “direct” connection to one of your switches, ground is connected via the chassis.
It’s hard to say, RVs are something totally different here in Europe, we mostly use vans like the Freightliner Sprinter or specially made RVs, but they are almost always based on a van wheel base.
Mike - you guessed exactly how I did it. We installed a Sonoff SV at each switch, replacing the existing physical rocker with a momentary rocker or momentary push button.
And yes, that does require ground at each location. We got lucky I guess. One area had ground already because it was near the radio. One was directly behind the thermostat which had a ground I could tap into. One didn’t have ground but was directly above the DC fuse panel so it was easy to fish one up. And one was in the desk area that was a custom build so I pulled the wires in.
But, as @paddy0174 mentioned, your RV is likely chassis grounded so any metal in contact with the chassis would also work.
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