Creating a Smart HUB for Van Conversion (Monitoring System)

Electronics
#1

I’m working on a POC van conversion.
The goal is too be modular, and utilize good technology – learn and have fun doing it.

Goal: Have a Tablet that displays all the key features (i.e. Dashboard). should be able to 1) Monitor Solar/Battery Array 2) Monitor Water Levels 3) Gas tank level. Would be really awesome if it did some other cool things like monitor temperature, use for security cameras (wyze or blink).

Parts Budget – $1,500 (but can be stretched).

Looking for help, guidance, gurus (even if it’s too tell me it can’t work).

Thanks

Ed

#2

Hit up @AndrewLeCody as he has done some monitoring on his Jeep.

#3

I made a custom hat/shield for a Raspberry Pi 3 to monitor my Jeep’s aftermarket dual battery system. The Eagle files are on my Github: https://github.com/aceat64/jeep-monitoring

One minor issue is that the protection circuitry on that board needs a rework, when disconnecting the battery one time the board became shortest/only path to ground and promptly released it’s magic smoke.

In general you’re going to want a shunt resistor to monitor the current draw to/from your battery, a good MPPT charge controller for your solar should have an API or serial bus you can get that data from as well. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Victron Energy products for this sort of thing. They’ve got a lot of stuff that lets you monitor it via bluetooth from your phone or tablet. This is the route I recommend going if you want something that’s mostly ready to go off the shelf, and don’t want to design hardware and write software.

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#4

Been wanting to learn how to use Rasberry PI, but just didn’t have the project to dive in… but this might be the time.

I can imagine already a 7" Raspberry PI touch screen HUB… Would need to make all sensors, lights, fans display and interact here. Thinking OpenHUB for software.

Need a mentor to help bring me down to earth… :money_mouth_face:

#5

I use Home Assistant for my home automation stuff and it works great, I could see it being used here to provide a control panel.

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