I am in the middle of slowly refurbishing a 90 year old trawler, upgrading DC and AC systems, new nav (OP2 now and OpenCPN), installing solar, wind and power management, water management and so on. Summer external works, winter, more internal out of the cold stuff like electrical.
I have installed a home made, approximately 400L/H water maker for approximately €1,200, built water tank level monitoring from nodemcu with ultrasonics and installing new 3 phase inverters, replacing DC and AC systems. As well as that installing sensors and automating heating control and automation.
I chose to use Home Assistant for most of the automation and systems control because the interface is a little friendlier to use for visitors and so on and have a dedicated tablet in the galley and use mobile devices for access onboard and remotely.
The system currently covers, digital switching of lighting, climate control of an old "dumb" kabola boiler, external CCTV, pulling some basic SignalK information into the the display (also a security measure for remote access as well).
I was using MQTT mainly, but decided to use Node Red (OP <-> HA) integration. It requires slowly building connections / integrations as needed, but it is a clean way of achieving a solution.
The Home Assistant currently has around 500 sensor/entities that can be reported on one way or another, from voltage monitoring at outlets to rules to disable the water pumps automatically if the tank levels get low.
Everything is built on Raspberry Pi's, plus OpenCPN running on laptop as well as OP for redundancy.
The ship had no NMEA onboard when I got it, so will be slowly adding NMEA devices for VHF, AIS and so on, the power system is mastervolt, so will be connecting their Masterbus into NMEA to collect power information from the DC systems.
One thing I found was that using Node Red on the OP device was easier to collect SignalK data that running Node Red on another device. I couldn't find a way to set the server address of the SignalK server to collect the paths from. It was easier to collect them from the localhost and push them into Home Assist and the Node Red HA palette can then create the sensors in HA automatically via the Node Red plugin. Using MQTT required extra steps to manually add the sensors in HA via YAML, which was prone to errors in the templating. Using Node Red, the system is push / pull without needing to manage MQTT.
Anyway, just thought it might be a nice discussion to look at using open source systems integration to run a 90 year old ship
I have installed a home made, approximately 400L/H water maker for approximately €1,200, built water tank level monitoring from nodemcu with ultrasonics and installing new 3 phase inverters, replacing DC and AC systems. As well as that installing sensors and automating heating control and automation.
I chose to use Home Assistant for most of the automation and systems control because the interface is a little friendlier to use for visitors and so on and have a dedicated tablet in the galley and use mobile devices for access onboard and remotely.
The system currently covers, digital switching of lighting, climate control of an old "dumb" kabola boiler, external CCTV, pulling some basic SignalK information into the the display (also a security measure for remote access as well).
I was using MQTT mainly, but decided to use Node Red (OP <-> HA) integration. It requires slowly building connections / integrations as needed, but it is a clean way of achieving a solution.
The Home Assistant currently has around 500 sensor/entities that can be reported on one way or another, from voltage monitoring at outlets to rules to disable the water pumps automatically if the tank levels get low.
Everything is built on Raspberry Pi's, plus OpenCPN running on laptop as well as OP for redundancy.
The ship had no NMEA onboard when I got it, so will be slowly adding NMEA devices for VHF, AIS and so on, the power system is mastervolt, so will be connecting their Masterbus into NMEA to collect power information from the DC systems.
One thing I found was that using Node Red on the OP device was easier to collect SignalK data that running Node Red on another device. I couldn't find a way to set the server address of the SignalK server to collect the paths from. It was easier to collect them from the localhost and push them into Home Assist and the Node Red HA palette can then create the sensors in HA automatically via the Node Red plugin. Using MQTT required extra steps to manually add the sensors in HA via YAML, which was prone to errors in the templating. Using Node Red, the system is push / pull without needing to manage MQTT.
Anyway, just thought it might be a nice discussion to look at using open source systems integration to run a 90 year old ship