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Is anyone using Raspberry Pi- and/or Arduino-controlled gear on their boat?


Gordias

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I just started playing with a Raspberry Pi (very small, cheap, low-power Linux computer,) and will get started on Arduino controllers in a few weeks.

Does anyone use either or both on their boats?  Is there a community of "makers" building interesting electronics for narrow boats?

FWIW I'm good with software, but this is my first venture into electronics in a very long time.  Sensors and controllers have become a lot cheaper.

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Not using any arduino stuff interacting with the boat's systems (yet!), but do play arduino quite a bit....

And am really enjoying using a ras pi as my main daily drive...great for internet and music / video... and only 10 watts....

Great fun, and has helped with my electronic education no end, as it's so easy to set up experiments.

 

 

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Pi's as a media centre (osmc connected to a couple of dvb tuners and a hard drive), a general computer (linux mate hung off the back off a 22" display), running a webcam for timelapse films on the move (raspbian with a logitech c270 webcam).

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We use the Ras Pi in the house connected to the Tv for playing all the .avi files downloaded from the internet......(!!!!) and another to work the NO-IP so we can remotely see our CCTV. Just bought our NB so now thinking, like you, what to do with the Ras Pi on the boat ......we will have one to drive the TV. Our son who came out for a delivery trip in May was thinking to put camera on the front of the boat connected into it and all sorts of clever stuff that I am sure will totally be useless - an 'efficiency' meter for the helm ie a reading that divides speed by revs - I reckon you can just look at the water flowing under the stern.

Back home I was thinking it could control the plant watering system on the patio via a properly plumbed in system rather than relying on the current 'Hozelock' system that uses a flexible feed pipe that could break and leak a lot of water (we are on a meter).

Interesting to see what you come up with in this thread. I'd love to find an application for the Ras Pi on the boat other than the telly.

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Yes I use it as a low power PC for when I need to do basic things. Also use it to scan for wifi networks using servo motors to get best signal and then repeat the signal inside the boat. I am planning to work on some sort of christmas light display for the boat using led strips when I get round to it... plenty of time yet. You can do everything with them though, one cool idea is thought of some sort of steering/throttle control for steering boat from upfront lol

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My winter project this year was a solar-charge monitor built using an arduino micro. It tells you current, amp-hours so far today, amp-hours yesterday and amp-hours total since reset. Also logs the current/time graph for the previous week or so,  which can be uploaded over USB to a laptop and displayed.

 

The fun bit was an algorithm to work out when midnight is, based solely on the output from the panel. Total software is about 600 lines of C and another couple of hundred on the laptop to do the comms and format the data for a GNUplot.

 

Cheers,

MP.

 

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Yes.

1 x Teensy (much superior to but similar to Arduino) controls filling my water tanks. It opens & closes the inlet valve to each and also tells me (using PC speakers) once a minute how long until both tanks are full, and what it is doing. It will be extended to warn me when it detects that my input hose is kinked. It also displays the levels in the tanks so I can see water reserves when taking a shower.

1 x Teensy being developed to detect & warn of cilling etc, ongoing for about 3 years but delayed by the need to install gas on my boat and do other essential works. Basically complete but awaiting testing opportunities. To be extended to report incidents over the internet with GPS position.

1 x Arduino Due to report 20 temperature sensors designed to 

  • show exactly what is happening in my cauliflower as my engine heats it up
  • show what exactly is happening in my skin tanks as my engine heats it up

This is built but awaiting a round tuit.

1 x Arduino Due to display the flue temperature of my SF stove and warn of runaways and going out, using a thermocouple. Built but awaiting a suitable flue fixing.

1 x Arduino Due to show the current barometric pressure, and the history for the past 24hrs and 7 days so that trends can be recognised (some hope!). It used to show tides at Woodbridge but no longer does so.

I would do a lot more but have to install gas on my boat, paint it, and 1001 other things first.

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1 hour ago, system 4-50 said:

1 x Arduino Due to report 20 temperature sensors designed to 

  • show exactly what is happening in my cauliflower as my engine heats it up
  • show what exactly is happening in my skin tanks as my engine heats it up

This is built but awaiting a round tuit.

 

SWMBO reckons that cauliflower cheese does not need computer control.

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Had started to use a pressure sensor + Arduino for monitoring the water tank level, but the sensor wasn't stable enough. Have a better quality sensor which will be developed sometime. (Unless I just use a sight tube!) Main problem is finding a sensor with sufficiently low pressure range, but they are available (the new one has a span of 100 mBar I think)

I also considered using an Arduino as a rudder indicator on our shared barge, but ended up using op-amps and an analogue meter: mainly because a digital display would be too hard to read in bright sunshine.

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43 minutes ago, Onewheeler said:

Had started to use a pressure sensor + Arduino for monitoring the water tank level, but the sensor wasn't stable enough. Have a better quality sensor which will be developed sometime. (Unless I just use a sight tube!) Main problem is finding a sensor with sufficiently low pressure range, but they are available (the new one has a span of 100 mBar I think)

I also considered using an Arduino as a rudder indicator on our shared barge, but ended up using op-amps and an analogue meter: mainly because a digital display would be too hard to read in bright sunshine.

I would very much like to have a better way of measuring tank levels. My current WEM sensors are too coarse, about 12 uneven steps from empty to full. Obviously finer detection is a waste of time unless you add computer powered averaging to eliminate wave effects in the tank. I'm sticking with the idea of steps plus a flowmeter (inbound) at present but the flowmeter is coarse as well.

I tried an Adafruit level sensor strip (quite expensive) but that had a substantial reported level variation in an absolutely static tank!

Edited by system 4-50
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18 minutes ago, system 4-50 said:

I would very much like to have a better way of measuring tank levels. My current WEM sensors are too coarse, about 12 uneven steps from empty to full. Obviously finer detection is a waste of time unless you add computer powered averaging to eliminate wave effects in the tank. I'm sticking with the idea of steps plus a flowmeter (inbound) at present but the flowmeter is coarse as well.

I tried an Adafruit level sensor strip (quite expensive) but that had a substantial reported level variation in an absolutely static tank!

Cheap water meter + piece of paper or thumb switches or other method of recording reading when tank is full. Gives current contents to within a litre or two, costs about £20.

 

Cheers,

MP.

 

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1 hour ago, system 4-50 said:

I would very much like to have a better way of measuring tank levels. My current WEM sensors are too coarse, about 12 uneven steps from empty to full. Obviously finer detection is a waste of time unless you add computer powered averaging to eliminate wave effects in the tank. I'm sticking with the idea of steps plus a flowmeter (inbound) at present but the flowmeter is coarse as well.

I've got a RS 181-1340  1 psi sensor waiting to be played with. 1 psi range, but it needs an op-amp interface to the Arduino as the output level only spans 30 mV.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm running a time-lapse camera on the front of the boat with a pi zero/w.. and combining into the day's video with a pi3. I also combine the cameras (a couple separate ones) with a virtual linux host at ovh.com so I can trigger photos and streaming video.

To-do list

 -low-latency Bow camera to screen at stern to use to see what's going on 70' ahead in real time

- adding GPS coordinates + a map overlay to the time-lapse view

- replace nest thermostat with pi zero

- ultrasonic sensors as "am I about to hit that" alarms

 

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For timelapses..

# this is the capture cronjob

@reboot sleep 60; /usr/bin/raspistill -w 1600 -h 1200 -q 60 -tl 4000 -t 0 -o /tl/img_\%04d.jpg

 

# the encoder doesn't like gaps, so if there are any missing captures I make sure to rename all

# the files with a perl script so they go 0001.jpg, 0002,jpg, 0003,jpg, etc with no gaps

 

# this is the encoder script

avconv -f image2 -r 25 -i img_%04d.jpg -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p /output.mp4

 

I used to run the encoder on a pi3- now I use an asus tinkerboard.. *basically* the same as a pi at more than double the speed.

 

Here's a sample.. Victoria park to Islington/Angel, by way of 2 cheeky runs through the tunnel. Time-lapse also makes it look like I hit things sometimes- that's just me stopping, reversing, etc to make this 70' beast go around some of the tighter bends without thrusters

timelapse.mp4

Edited by DanB
added video
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Pennine: there is already a way that works, it just annoys me a bit because I don't want the cable. I can handle ~30ms latency from using wireless, but 2-3 seconds caused by encoding and establishing stream buffers is too much to bear!

 

Here's the working/wires/ugly way:

Raspberry pi + camera at front of boat

HDMI ->rj45 (ethernet cable) adaptor

cable to back of boat

rj45->HDMI

HDMI to screen on back of boat (include some kind of "Screen doesn't go blank" settings)

run "raspistill" with preview mode output to HDMI. little or no visible lag, 4k output

 

 

You can get an ethernet-friendly stream to tablet or smartphone but with a 2-3 second delay caused by encode/decode this way:

This is my pi-zero + camera script:

# cat stream
#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/sudo modprobe bcm2835-v4l2
/usr/bin/sudo -u pi /usr/bin/cvlc v4l2:///dev/video0 --no-audio --v4l2-width 1280 --v4l2-height 760 --v4l2-chroma h264 --sout '#standard{access=http,mux=ts,dst=0.0.0.0:12345}'

 

Client/tablet etc:

open.. network stream.. http://IP_OF_YOUR_PI:12345

 

 

I sit the ipad on the kitchen table and use this as my "window" sometimes just on internal network

Edited by DanB
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  • 2 weeks later...

Has anyone tried a low power consumption system using a hardware timer to start/stop a Raspberry Pi and/or controllers (Arduino etc)?

I decided to look at this as a first project, and bought a few parts, but I'm unsure about a low-power timer.

I found several high-function timers that run on 12V 100 mA which is too much IMO.  At the other end of the scale there's an Adafruit component (TPL5110) at 20 micro-Amps, and I found an article that shows how to get an Arduino Pro Mini down to (approx) 25 - 50 micro-Amp.

Has anyone tried a TPL5110 or "tweaked" Arduino Pro Mini?  Any info on how much total power use for timing and system start/stop would be if you "wake up" some gear (e.g. a Raspberry Pi Zero or an Arduino, then from there a couple of small Arduinos, and some simple sensors say every 15 or 30 min?

For now the TPL5110 looks like it's the most practical option, but I'll probably try out the small Arduino too :)  They're both cheap enough that you could have two fully independent units running in parallel for lightweight fault-tolerance.

 

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make sure you get the right arduino pro mini to suit your needs, (3.3v or 5v)

a previous project using the pro mini as a pwm controller for a large dc motor (200A via a bank of fets) we found that the 3.3v output would not consistently switch the fets (we ended up putting an optocouple in line to solve the problem)

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