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+--- Thread: Monitor bilge pump (Qwiic) (/showthread.php?tid=3700)
Monitor bilge pump (Qwiic) - Edvino - 2021-09-26
Hi
Winter is upon us (northern hemisphere) and I want to set up some remote monitoring of my boat, as it will be staying in the water this winter.
I have a rpi4 with pican-m. I plan to set up an Internet connection via 4g usb stick.
I was wondering how I go about monitoring my bilge pump using a qwiic sensor via my pican-m. It has floater which activates it, so I think something that senses the current draw would work?
Thanks in advance.
RE: Monitor bilge pump (Qwiic) - abarrow - 2021-09-26
I would think that you could just measure the voltage across the switch, or between one of the sides of the switch and ground. When the switch is activated, the voltage across it will be zero, when it is open it won't be zero. Or, just measure the voltage across the pump, if you have a separate switch and pump. If you don't have direct access to the switch, I would open up the pump, find where the switch is, and bring a couple of wires out.
Put a voltmeter across the leads and activate the switch and see what changes. If, for example, you see a transition between house voltage (12V?) and zero, you can put a small resistor voltage divider there to drop that voltage to 3V and then trigger when it goes from 3V to zero.
Once you have that, you can use a GPIO on the PI to monitor the change.
RE: Monitor bilge pump (Qwiic) - Sea-and-Sea - 2021-10-17
I'm doing something similar. However, how do you get Openplotter or SignalK to monitor and action when the bilge pump activates?
RE: Monitor bilge pump (Qwiic) - abarrow - 2021-10-17
You can use the GPIO module in OpenPlotter to assign a pin to a SignalK key. There are a number of SignalK plugins available for notifications based on key values.
RE: Monitor bilge pump (Qwiic) - Sea-and-Sea - 2021-10-19
(2021-10-17, 09:19 PM)abarrow Wrote: You can use the GPIO module in OpenPlotter to assign a pin to a SignalK key. There are a number of SignalK plugins available for notifications based on key values.
I'm not running Openplotter on the Pi near the pump, is there an alternative way please?
Colin