Category: Campervan
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No Propane, Dead Solenoid
On my last outing my propane quit working. My campervans propane tank is permanently mounted under the van. To make it possible to shut off the propane without crawling under the van, it has a remote shutoff valve operated by a 12-volt solenoid. The valve is held closed by a spring mechanism, so if power…
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The Not-Normal Way to Read Tank Gauges
OEM holding tank gauges are unreliable and inaccurate. Normal people solve this by buying Garnet’s SeeLevel sending units with the appropriate SeeLevel control panel. If they want to integrate their gauges into their camper’s monitoring system, they buy the versions with RV-C or NMEA2000 interfaces. This post was not written by a normal person.
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Monitoring and Message Bus Redesign
Edit: Up-to-date description of the campervans technology stack. Warning. More nerd stuff coming up. A year ago, I started monitoring various parts of the campervan using a Raspberry Pi, ESP32 microcontrollers, and the cloud based Blynk IoT framework. A short time later I added a Nextion touchscreen display: Every Camper needs a Message Bus 😀…
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It was supposed to be simple
I have three USB-power devices stuck to my dash or windshield – a Garmin nav, an old phone I use as an OBD-II dashboard, and a dash cam. We also sometimes need to charge our cell phones while driving. Three plus two = five USB power cords hanging off two lighter sockets, both down by…
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Electrical Redesign – More Battery
As of the last revision of my camper’s electrical system, I had two battery banks with the ability to charge both and switch between them as needed. Under normal use, the AGM battery bank would barely last one night, and only if it were fully charged late in the afternoon. To balance the utilization between…
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IoT – Dumb Camper gets Smart(er)
Edit: Up to date description of the technology stack. I’ve made progress on the information screen that I want to incorporate into the camper. As hinted at in the message bus post, I’m using a 7″ Nextion display and an ESP32 to create a touch screen interface into the temperature and electrical data that I’ve…
Michael Janke 