This is a pretty nerdy post, but I consider myself a professional nerd and I know there are a few of us here.
I love the Internet of Things. My EE skills are poor so I rely on a lot of off the shelf hardware to instrument the RV. Right now, there are four Raspberry Pis in the RV. One’s monitoring the Solar Charge Controller, another monitors the GPS signals.
The third controls a 8 port relay box I made recently. This system's job is to control the heating elements around the water pipes under the RV. (
The Quest for a Slightly Less Dumb Home)
The fourth Pi is the Primary Pi. It’s my WiFi Relay, my message broker (I use MQTT). It has a temperature probe on it. And it has a Sensor Hat on it too. (
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/sense-hat/).
There are plans for a fifth Pi that’ll connect to the Ford’s OBD-II port to monitor the engine. But that’s still on the to-do list.
Long story short – getting all of those Pis to connect, getting the three Pis to send their data to the Primary Pi wasn’t the hard part.
Getting the Primary Pi to relay data to a nearby WiFi connection was tricky but the information’s out there and it was just a matter of trying some things. But that’s working – the Pi’s relay their data to the Primary Pi, who in turn, sends the data over WiFi to the Internet and it makes it’s way home.
Where I can put the data up on a dashboard.
So now I can have my RV sit in the storage lot and send me sensor data See Dashboard 1 and 2 screen shots.
What took me the most time to figure out and to configure was how to sit at home and connect back into the RV! How I could sit at my desktop and ssh into those Raspberry Pis to do updates, make tweaks etc. I’ll save those details for later, but it took configuring a “reverse ssh tunnel” to make that happen.
Summarizing, the RV can send me data while it’s away and I can log into it and see what’s going on from the comfort of my home office.
Pretty nerdy!
p { margin-bottom: 0.1in; line-height: 115% } a:link { so-language: zxx }
Linear Mode
