Electronics and Software
Our main projects for this winter have been to extend the integration of our electronics and navigation systems and to add additional sensors with intelligent monitoring - gauges and voice alarms to replace the beepers and idiot lights.
We have worked on addressing engine overheating (adding seacocks in addition to cooling via the saildrives, new water pump and monitoring engine exhaust temperatures). We decided we'd like to extend this to have monitoring the temperature at the blocks and thermostats plus oil pressure and rev counters. So by the new season all we should have left to do is a bit of wiring and we'll have screens around the boat which will make all these visible as gauges with voice alarms to replace the beepers we currently have.
The objective is to have wind data, log, engine data all visible at the same time as navigation and AIS data. On any web-enabled device around the boat.
This is being achieved using
SignalK to integrate NMEA2000, NMEA0183, Bluetooth, Modbus plus the
MQTT broker.
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Monitoring for Engines, Solar and Batteries
The
ESP32 is a remarkable little board and very cheap to buy (less than £5 from
AliExpress). We're fitting them with breakout boards for ease of wiring and protective boxes to be sited in the engine bays to provide the engine data we need. These will feed data to
SignalK on the Raspberry Pi where the gauges are displayed via the KIP software module integrated into SignalK.
We are also upgrading our monitoring for the batteries (using a
Bluetooth NASA
BM1) and the solar panels (using an
Epever MPPT charger) so that they too are fully integrated into the network system, changing from our own gauges to KIP gauges.
And if you want to get down and dirty, we're using an
MQTT broker to pass messages. Not really because we need to right now as there are other methods but primarily for future-proofing using the latest standard.
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Open Source Software
We are using Open Source software for the entire system. The cost savings against using proprietary branded hardware and software are no-brainers. In any case, we've both authored and supported Open Source software now for more than a decade and we believe in the principle - as well as the practice.
This includes :
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