8 ms·

DIY Boat Monitoring System

156 points by fnord77 6y ago

japanuspus 6y ago
I have had a Lilygo T-Call [0] on my basement table all winter with the intention of building almost exactly this! (My idea was to use cellular instead of WiFi). Thank you very much for the write-up! [0]: http://www.lilygo.cn/prod_view.aspx?TypeId=50044&Id=1127&FId=t3:50044:3 http://www.lilygo.cn/prod_view.aspx?TypeId=50044&Id=1127&FId...
odonnellryan 6y ago
This is great. I will be on a mooring for the first time this year and it is very tempting to build something like this! But my boat will be close enough where I could almost look out my window to check on it. :)
- samstave 6y ago
  Still worth the attempt if youre going to be mooring anyway - just for fun.
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  Hey, if your boat is that close to you, skip the WiFi and send the daily report over marine VHF. In fact, if you decouple the delivery method from the report generation, you can have have it running even while under sail and do periodic data collection and logging. If you get a Marine SSB radio, you could even collect the data while crossing an ocean!
  - yardie 6y ago
    How would you send a report over VHF? From what I understand the only digital bands are DSC and AIS and that is broadcast only, anyone can listen in. SSB is not a set and forget communication. It's great for long distance communications but the operator has to be seriously fairly knowledgeable on how to make HF work. It's a 100W radio that can do some damage if used incorrectly.
    - daniellarusso 6y ago
      text to speech?
  - odonnellryan 6y ago
    Ha, neat idea - but 4g is probably a lot easier!
- Johnny555 6y ago
  But will you be looking if the drain plug comes out at 2am and suddenly the only thing keeping the boat afloat is the bilge pump and the battery? Still seems like a good idea to have monitoring even if you can see the boat.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    Can a drain plug "come out" without human intervention? If someone wants to sink my boat, they might want to trash the monitor first...
    - Johnny555 6y ago
      I'm not a boat person, so I have no first hand experience other than seeing a picture from a friend whose boat was half under water because the drain plug had corroded away. He blamed it on galvanic corrosion from the boat being plugged into shore power with depleted anodes. A quick google search shows that corroded drain plugs do happen from time to time. And the drain plug is just one of the through-hull fittings that can leak. Came across this quote: To quote BoatUS Insurance, “for every one boat that sinks underway, four sink at the dock” and “failed thru-hull fittings account for 50% of all sunken boats at the dock.
      - jessaustin 6y ago
        I never did understand why some sailboats have so many holes in the hull. This one for a drain, this one for an old-fashioned "paddle wheel" speedometer, this one for "inspection", good grief. A single drain hole through the transom makes sense for a planing hull that is regularly trailered or lifted, but not for anything with a massive lead keel. Before setting up a complicated monitoring system, boat owners should buy some plastic plugs for $10 per. That should really be a requirement on insurance contracts...
        odonnellryan 5y ago
        Totally. Many boats have too many thruhulls. I have: - Galley sink drain - Galley sink raw water in - 3x transducers (came with boat, kept them where they are, definitely a liability) - Water intake Too many for my liking. I think I could get rid of the speedo and one transducer and live a little more comfortably... maybe next year.
Tepix 6y ago
This is neat. The german sailing forum has some guys doing ambitious DIY boat related electronics: https://www.segeln-forum.de/board194-boot-technik/board195-open-boat-projects-org/ https://www.segeln-forum.de/board194-boot-technik/board195-o... https://open-boat-projects.org/ https://open-boat-projects.org/
kwdc 6y ago
Looks like a great student project. Those ESP modules are great for these types of applications. I'm thinking about adding a camera setup for mine.
- swiley 6y ago
  Every time I go to use these I always run into weird show stopping bugs in the closed firmware. Maybe my expectations for microcontroller software are too high.
  - shirleyquirk 6y ago
    Can you elaborate? Ive been lucky so far but Id like to know what to look out for
- fest 6y ago
  Ttgo Esp32 module with LCD (or was that an OLED?) is my go-to solution for one-offs and quick prototypes. Previously it was stm32, but I found myself fiddling with inconsistent SDK (ST's HAL) and myriad of configuration options for peripherals a lot more than when using SDK. The screen is also useful for debugging info (what's the IP of this device? what is the current state of inputs/outputs?). So far I've built controller for x-ray tube (turning AC on for required number of cycles), oil boiler consumption monitor, gate/garage door opener (to remotely open the gate for delivery courriers), remote power and monitoring for electrical boiler for sauna and some more.
  - kwdc 6y ago
    I'm using the teensy for a bunch of keyboard projects and having a blast. On the other hand, FPGAs have warped my sense of what is possible though. Allocating s corner of a chip to one role and having other areas do other tasks at the same time with no context switching (...because hardware) gets very addictive.
GreggHyram 6y ago
I built something similar using a RockBlock board and a PI once. The cost was a bit prohibitive in the end as as it was satellite data and not wifi.
FerretFred 6y ago
Is email the best option? I had a bunch of small servers that I dutifully monitored via email, until email stopped sending for whatever reason. I now use MQTT via a bash script: very reliable.
- whalesalad 6y ago
  Email not sending is a good problem - it means someting is broken and you gotta look into it. Good thing about email is that it can be dismissed. It literally goes into an inbox where you are already looking at other things that need your attention - and then you can delete/archive when you see that everything is fine.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    You can also do more complicated things on the receiving side of the email, with something like imapfilter (or just a thunderbird incoming mail rule on a desktop PC at your house), to auto sort alerts or notices of nominal condition into certain folders/subfolders. https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter
floathub 6y ago
Blatant self promotion, we do this at some scale: https://floathub.com https://floathub.com And there's a guide to using our open source software-only option on a Pi: https://medium.com/@floathub/open-source-boat-monitoring-7ea8b97c5acd https://medium.com/@floathub/open-source-boat-monitoring-7ea... Contacting the author of the parent version now to compare notes :-)
- andrew_ 6y ago
  I'd love to use this for overnight drops from the hi n dry. The one thing I didn't see mentioned is powering the unit with DC-only. I'm a PI newbie and I don't run an AC inverter on board.
  - floathub 6y ago
    Super easy to power a Pi from DC only. Many (most) USB ports will work (the amperage draw can be a bit much for some older lighter-style USB power adapters). The power draw from our dedicated device (https://floathub.com/store https://floathub.com/store) is much lower than a Pi, but you don't get the advantage of a general purpose computer that can run other stuff at the same time.
    - andrew_ 6y ago
      Appreciate the reply. It looks like there's a bunch of sensors I can hook up to the pi as well. Again, really appreciate you sharing this!
      - lostlogin 6y ago
        There are some great sensor options out there and they are dirt cheap (cents or a couple of dollars). ESP32 and ESP8266 are my chips of choice and they are also very cheap. Some great projects are easily achievable from Arduino. It seems to be slightly looked down on as a platform, but I’m not skilled enough to know why. It has an IDE and a language that’s easy enough to use. There is also a huge community and a mass of projects out there. ESPHome is another excellent project which takes the coding down to just yaml config files and then you can makes automations one Home Assistant.
johnnythunder 6y ago
Brilliant work, my initial thoughts are that it might be significantly less work to patch/seal/address the leaks in the hull than to engineer, build, install, monitor the electronics for this. Is this not the case?
- sathackr 6y ago
  Something always leaks. If anything just the packings around the propeller shafts (though since this is a sailboat it may not have propeller shafts). And there is maintenance. Even if you seal up all of the leaks, something will always degrade and start leaking. If you are away from the boat for weeks at a time, you may find your leak-free boat on the bottom of the harbor. So yes, you could conceivably find and seal every single leak, especially if you don't have a rotating shaft that penetrates the hull, but it would not negate the need for monitoring.
- andrew_ 6y ago
  Depending on the vessel, leaks are part of the design. Seals always leak. Salt water is highly corrosive and will always "find a way." I own a smallish boat on the Gulf of Mexico with outboards (lacking the shaft seals that inboard boats have) and water STILL finds a way into the bilge. I have three pumps, one main and two redundant, just in the event one of my scupper seals goes, something/someone strikes my boat hard enough to puncture the hull below the water line, or one of my through-hull fittings (like raw water pump) develops a leak, while the boat is out in the Gulf or sitting at the marina. Might seem like overkill where regular maintenance should be sufficient but you can never have too many redundancies to keep a boat afloat. Murphy's Law very much applies.
- rkangel 6y ago
  It's a bit like saying "it's significantly less work to just fix the bugs than write unit tests". There are always bugs (leaks) and potential for bugs (leaks), some effort in both directions is usually a better use of time (and in this case, money).
- krisoft 6y ago
  These are not exclusive propositions. You fix/patch/seal any leak you know of and can fix and set up a pump to deal with the rest. And then you monitor both to check that the pump still operates and the leak rate did not increase.
sathackr 6y ago
Very nice work overall, and I admit I haven't read the entire project, but it seems the entire authority to operate both pumps has been delegated to a microcontroller that becomes a single point of failure for the entire system. Given the cost of the system and chance for failure I think it would make sense to either add a second system or enable some sort of automatic override (possibly via mechanical float switch wired directly to large pump and set at a higher water level than the other two switches) So that there will be enough time between a potential large leak occuring and detection of controller failure(via lack of daily email) to prevent it from sinking the boat.
- rkangel 6y ago
  That wasn't my read. My read was that they go off independently based on their own conditions (the large pump has a float switch that presumably isn't set off until after the small pump should have taken care of it) and the monitor just records these things.
  - sathackr 6y ago
    Based on what was wrote I don't think that's the case. He included some special conditions like: >The monitor knows if I take the boat out when I turn on the main boat power and switches the small pump to auto and otherwise stops monitoring. But when the main power is back on, the pump will initially run every half hour and then every hour and then after about a day it will only be running once a day" Though reading closer there are only two relays, and the author talks about controlling both the small pump and the fan with relays, and there is language around the large pump that while isn't conclusive, may indicate it is indeed on a separate float switch and system and the ESP32 is only involved in the monitoring of it. > I have a large pump that only goes off if the small pump fails or the boat is trying to sink. If the float switch lifts, the monitor wakes up and sends an email alerting me.
- vvanders 6y ago
  Yeah, I automated some stuff out in our greenhouse, I ended up going with a PLC[1] which is a bit more robust and designed for reliability and industrial environments. They're very much like (expensive!) lego bricks that you can easily throw together + program. The PLC sends me a mail each morning with how much water it used, the max temperature of the water pump(I repurposed a RV water pump with a PID PWM + SSR driven from the PLC) all running from a 24v solar system. They're very much designed to be in-the-loop on systems that need to be robust with pretty extensive error report/alarms and the like. [1] https://www.automationdirect.com/productivity/p1000 https://www.automationdirect.com/productivity/p1000
IgorPartola 6y ago
I am a huge fan of feeding this kind of info into Home Assistant via MQTT. It’s a little convoluted since their data model is not what I expected it to be (each sensor has a device record, not the other way around), but overall I am able to read e.g. air quality measurements from around my house and create automations based on that. I used to get various telemetry read outs via email in the mornings and while they are nice they still require me to remember to read an email and more importantly to notice that an email is missing. A more positive feedback system is more secure: send me an alarm notification when something is wrong the one day a year that it is, not 364 notifications a year that everything is right.
- sathackr 6y ago
  The issue with an alarm only when something is wrong, is that you don't know that your monitoring system is working until you actually get that notification. You could just check the system every day and avoid the 'heartbeat' email, but that's likely to be forgotten/missed more often than seeing/reading the received email. You could set up a monitoring system for the monitoring system...
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    > You could set up a monitoring system for the monitoring system... I'm considering this for a home automation system: a smaller, simpler device connected to the network, powered via battery (recharged from mains but surge protected) aka UPS, and able to send SMS messages via mobile network. The idea is it's a heartbeat/monitoring system for the essentials: - power cut/outage - network down/outage - main server down, or has some problem Then I can get an SMS telling me something's wrong.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    Pingdom integration or similar may be an option. There are some very cheap or free options out there. Checking from outside is not ideal though as a network outage looks the same as a sinking, a leak or any other problem.
  - batch12 6y ago
dataviz1000 6y ago
I've had a novel idea from years ago. For the most part, there is no security on mega yachts. Moreover, they hire random people to wash them and maintain them. It's nothing to gain access to the all the electronics in the cave under the wheelhouse. So, the novel idea is this, a bunch of kids from MIT or CalTech or where ever decide to bug yachts. They get unassuming jobs as deckhands and stewards to give themselves time to install devices like this DIY boat monitoring system along with microphones behind all the panelling around the yachts which are owned by CEOs of major companies. More or less, the device caches all the audio recordings and waits for the ship to enter a marina where it connects to wifi and sends the information home. They are looking for stock trading information, mostly. They are in the Caribbean maybe in St. Martin and overhear some nasty things by the Russian mafia. Someone made a mistake and they get caught. That's the beginning. The rest of the novel is a bunch of nerdy kids having to MacGyver their way out of the Caribbean while being chased by the most powerful and dangerous people on Earth.
- batch12 6y ago
  Ha, at the beginning I read the word novel as new. I was getting a little disturbed by this until I read on to understand this was fiction. Wrong novel :). Embarrassingly, this took too long to realize...
  - nexuist 6y ago
    You are not alone!
  - hnnnnnnng 6y ago
    I interpreted it the same way but instead of being disturbed I searched for boat cleaning jobs and wondered how much the CIA and other intelligence agencies invest in bugging mega yachts.
    - dataviz1000 6y ago
      Here is a popular list of available jobs.[0] The site started by listing day work jobs which means a job that is only day to day. The captain usually picks up the day workers in the morning who are crew between jobs and they sand the rails, varnish, clean bilges, wash the yachts, and detail the metal work. The site lists lots of other more permanent jobs too and is a popular resource for people in the industry. > "144192 5/4/2021 Yacht Looking for 8 day workers to wash and detail yacht on Monday May 10th. 8 hours. FT LAUDERDALE" That job probably pays $15 - $20 an hour cash under the table and the chef will make them all lunch. Not a bad gig job. 8 day workers? That's a lot, they wouldn't need that many people for 120 foot yacht[1]. The price of that yacht probably starts at something like $18,000,000. It would be a nothing burger to install anything on that boat with nobody noticing. [0] https://www.daywork123.com/JobAnnouncementList.aspx https://www.daywork123.com/JobAnnouncementList.aspx [1] https://www.denisonyachtsales.com/yachts-for-sale/?brand=&minlength=120&maxlength=130 https://www.denisonyachtsales.com/yachts-for-sale/?brand=&mi...
walrus01 6y ago
One question on this, how exactly is this ESP32 email library implemented? Because I think negotiating a TLS1.2 connection, might be beyond the abilities of an ESP32. You'd need your own 'friendly' email server that is expecting traffic from that specific IoT device, allowing outbound relay through it. One of the challenges of doing outbound SMTP from randomly located IoT devices is that due to weirdness of cellular or other uplinks, it might appear from a wide range of IPs. Normally if I have some old weird monitoring device on a network that needs to send unauthenticated SMTP outbound for alerting, I can give postfix an ACL for its specific static /32, but that can't be a good solution for something like this...
- avhon1 6y ago
  The ESP32 can negotiate TLS1.2, using, among other options, mbedtls. https://tls.mbed.org/api/ https://tls.mbed.org/api/ > mbed TLS supports SSLv3 up to TLSv1.2
  - walrus01 6y ago
    wow, well, tiny/cheap/low power stuff is certainly getting quite capable these days!
coretx 6y ago
The author may want to consider using LORA as a backup for 3g/4g for connectivity as the use of jammers by thieves and burglars becomes more common as days pass.
contingencies 6y ago
Here's someone who knows enough about electronics to design using Eagle and write firmware yet feels it's an acceptable risk to have a custom exposed board in their bilge. From a systems level critically relying on any of the following seems iffy in a marine environment where safety is key: wireless (unreliable; may be accidentally suddenly degraded by changes to outside environment), remote store and forward email notifications (unreliable and slow), single MCUs (due to SPOF), unsealed electronics in the bilge (extremely dangerous and often causes corrosion and loss of rudders), press-fit electronics (bad in marine environments, particularly near engines, due to vibration).
- allene222 5y ago
  Nothing is in the bilge and nothing is unsealed. It is in a NMEA 4X/ IP67 box. You are correct that all kind of things like WiFi, email servers, etc are unreliable. There is a ton of fault tolerant code in there now. Retries, exits to loops so they cannot hang. The ultimate backup is that if I don't get an email in the morning, something is wrong. That is why I send an email every day regardless of the conditions on the boat. Perhaps I should write all that up as well.

156 points by fnord77 6y ago

I have had a Lilygo T-Call [0] on my basement table all winter with the intention of building almost exactly this! (My idea was to use cellular instead of WiFi). Thank you very much for the write-up! [0]: http://www.lilygo.cn/prod_view.aspx?TypeId=50044&Id=1127&FId=t3:50044:3 http://www.lilygo.cn/prod_view.aspx?TypeId=50044&Id=1127&FId...

odonnellryan 6y ago

This is great. I will be on a mooring for the first time this year and it is very tempting to build something like this! But my boat will be close enough where I could almost look out my window to check on it. :)

samstave 6y ago
Still worth the attempt if youre going to be mooring anyway - just for fun.
OldHand2018 6y ago
Hey, if your boat is that close to you, skip the WiFi and send the daily report over marine VHF. In fact, if you decouple the delivery method from the report generation, you can have have it running even while under sail and do periodic data collection and logging. If you get a Marine SSB radio, you could even collect the data while crossing an ocean!
- yardie 6y ago
  How would you send a report over VHF? From what I understand the only digital bands are DSC and AIS and that is broadcast only, anyone can listen in. SSB is not a set and forget communication. It's great for long distance communications but the operator has to be seriously fairly knowledgeable on how to make HF work. It's a 100W radio that can do some damage if used incorrectly.
  - daniellarusso 6y ago
    text to speech?
- odonnellryan 6y ago
  Ha, neat idea - but 4g is probably a lot easier!
Johnny555 6y ago
But will you be looking if the drain plug comes out at 2am and suddenly the only thing keeping the boat afloat is the bilge pump and the battery? Still seems like a good idea to have monitoring even if you can see the boat.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  Can a drain plug "come out" without human intervention? If someone wants to sink my boat, they might want to trash the monitor first...
  - Johnny555 6y ago
    I'm not a boat person, so I have no first hand experience other than seeing a picture from a friend whose boat was half under water because the drain plug had corroded away. He blamed it on galvanic corrosion from the boat being plugged into shore power with depleted anodes. A quick google search shows that corroded drain plugs do happen from time to time. And the drain plug is just one of the through-hull fittings that can leak. Came across this quote: To quote BoatUS Insurance, “for every one boat that sinks underway, four sink at the dock” and “failed thru-hull fittings account for 50% of all sunken boats at the dock.
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      I never did understand why some sailboats have so many holes in the hull. This one for a drain, this one for an old-fashioned "paddle wheel" speedometer, this one for "inspection", good grief. A single drain hole through the transom makes sense for a planing hull that is regularly trailered or lifted, but not for anything with a massive lead keel. Before setting up a complicated monitoring system, boat owners should buy some plastic plugs for $10 per. That should really be a requirement on insurance contracts...
      - odonnellryan 5y ago
        Totally. Many boats have too many thruhulls. I have: - Galley sink drain - Galley sink raw water in - 3x transducers (came with boat, kept them where they are, definitely a liability) - Water intake Too many for my liking. I think I could get rid of the speedo and one transducer and live a little more comfortably... maybe next year.

Tepix 6y ago

This is neat. The german sailing forum has some guys doing ambitious DIY boat related electronics: https://www.segeln-forum.de/board194-boot-technik/board195-open-boat-projects-org/ https://www.segeln-forum.de/board194-boot-technik/board195-o... https://open-boat-projects.org/ https://open-boat-projects.org/

kwdc 6y ago

Looks like a great student project. Those ESP modules are great for these types of applications. I'm thinking about adding a camera setup for mine.

swiley 6y ago
Every time I go to use these I always run into weird show stopping bugs in the closed firmware. Maybe my expectations for microcontroller software are too high.
- shirleyquirk 6y ago
  Can you elaborate? Ive been lucky so far but Id like to know what to look out for
fest 6y ago
Ttgo Esp32 module with LCD (or was that an OLED?) is my go-to solution for one-offs and quick prototypes. Previously it was stm32, but I found myself fiddling with inconsistent SDK (ST's HAL) and myriad of configuration options for peripherals a lot more than when using SDK. The screen is also useful for debugging info (what's the IP of this device? what is the current state of inputs/outputs?). So far I've built controller for x-ray tube (turning AC on for required number of cycles), oil boiler consumption monitor, gate/garage door opener (to remotely open the gate for delivery courriers), remote power and monitoring for electrical boiler for sauna and some more.
- kwdc 6y ago
  I'm using the teensy for a bunch of keyboard projects and having a blast. On the other hand, FPGAs have warped my sense of what is possible though. Allocating s corner of a chip to one role and having other areas do other tasks at the same time with no context switching (...because hardware) gets very addictive.

GreggHyram 6y ago

I built something similar using a RockBlock board and a PI once. The cost was a bit prohibitive in the end as as it was satellite data and not wifi.

FerretFred 6y ago

Is email the best option? I had a bunch of small servers that I dutifully monitored via email, until email stopped sending for whatever reason. I now use MQTT via a bash script: very reliable.

whalesalad 6y ago
Email not sending is a good problem - it means someting is broken and you gotta look into it. Good thing about email is that it can be dismissed. It literally goes into an inbox where you are already looking at other things that need your attention - and then you can delete/archive when you see that everything is fine.
- walrus01 6y ago
  You can also do more complicated things on the receiving side of the email, with something like imapfilter (or just a thunderbird incoming mail rule on a desktop PC at your house), to auto sort alerts or notices of nominal condition into certain folders/subfolders. https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter

floathub 6y ago

Blatant self promotion, we do this at some scale: https://floathub.com https://floathub.com And there's a guide to using our open source software-only option on a Pi: https://medium.com/@floathub/open-source-boat-monitoring-7ea8b97c5acd https://medium.com/@floathub/open-source-boat-monitoring-7ea... Contacting the author of the parent version now to compare notes :-)

andrew_ 6y ago
I'd love to use this for overnight drops from the hi n dry. The one thing I didn't see mentioned is powering the unit with DC-only. I'm a PI newbie and I don't run an AC inverter on board.
- floathub 6y ago
  Super easy to power a Pi from DC only. Many (most) USB ports will work (the amperage draw can be a bit much for some older lighter-style USB power adapters). The power draw from our dedicated device (https://floathub.com/store https://floathub.com/store) is much lower than a Pi, but you don't get the advantage of a general purpose computer that can run other stuff at the same time.
  - andrew_ 6y ago
    Appreciate the reply. It looks like there's a bunch of sensors I can hook up to the pi as well. Again, really appreciate you sharing this!
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      There are some great sensor options out there and they are dirt cheap (cents or a couple of dollars). ESP32 and ESP8266 are my chips of choice and they are also very cheap. Some great projects are easily achievable from Arduino. It seems to be slightly looked down on as a platform, but I’m not skilled enough to know why. It has an IDE and a language that’s easy enough to use. There is also a huge community and a mass of projects out there. ESPHome is another excellent project which takes the coding down to just yaml config files and then you can makes automations one Home Assistant.

johnnythunder 6y ago

Brilliant work, my initial thoughts are that it might be significantly less work to patch/seal/address the leaks in the hull than to engineer, build, install, monitor the electronics for this. Is this not the case?

sathackr 6y ago
Something always leaks. If anything just the packings around the propeller shafts (though since this is a sailboat it may not have propeller shafts). And there is maintenance. Even if you seal up all of the leaks, something will always degrade and start leaking. If you are away from the boat for weeks at a time, you may find your leak-free boat on the bottom of the harbor. So yes, you could conceivably find and seal every single leak, especially if you don't have a rotating shaft that penetrates the hull, but it would not negate the need for monitoring.
andrew_ 6y ago
Depending on the vessel, leaks are part of the design. Seals always leak. Salt water is highly corrosive and will always "find a way." I own a smallish boat on the Gulf of Mexico with outboards (lacking the shaft seals that inboard boats have) and water STILL finds a way into the bilge. I have three pumps, one main and two redundant, just in the event one of my scupper seals goes, something/someone strikes my boat hard enough to puncture the hull below the water line, or one of my through-hull fittings (like raw water pump) develops a leak, while the boat is out in the Gulf or sitting at the marina. Might seem like overkill where regular maintenance should be sufficient but you can never have too many redundancies to keep a boat afloat. Murphy's Law very much applies.
rkangel 6y ago
It's a bit like saying "it's significantly less work to just fix the bugs than write unit tests". There are always bugs (leaks) and potential for bugs (leaks), some effort in both directions is usually a better use of time (and in this case, money).
krisoft 6y ago
These are not exclusive propositions. You fix/patch/seal any leak you know of and can fix and set up a pump to deal with the rest. And then you monitor both to check that the pump still operates and the leak rate did not increase.

sathackr 6y ago

Very nice work overall, and I admit I haven't read the entire project, but it seems the entire authority to operate both pumps has been delegated to a microcontroller that becomes a single point of failure for the entire system. Given the cost of the system and chance for failure I think it would make sense to either add a second system or enable some sort of automatic override (possibly via mechanical float switch wired directly to large pump and set at a higher water level than the other two switches) So that there will be enough time between a potential large leak occuring and detection of controller failure(via lack of daily email) to prevent it from sinking the boat.

rkangel 6y ago
That wasn't my read. My read was that they go off independently based on their own conditions (the large pump has a float switch that presumably isn't set off until after the small pump should have taken care of it) and the monitor just records these things.
- sathackr 6y ago
  Based on what was wrote I don't think that's the case. He included some special conditions like: >The monitor knows if I take the boat out when I turn on the main boat power and switches the small pump to auto and otherwise stops monitoring. But when the main power is back on, the pump will initially run every half hour and then every hour and then after about a day it will only be running once a day" Though reading closer there are only two relays, and the author talks about controlling both the small pump and the fan with relays, and there is language around the large pump that while isn't conclusive, may indicate it is indeed on a separate float switch and system and the ESP32 is only involved in the monitoring of it. > I have a large pump that only goes off if the small pump fails or the boat is trying to sink. If the float switch lifts, the monitor wakes up and sends an email alerting me.
vvanders 6y ago
Yeah, I automated some stuff out in our greenhouse, I ended up going with a PLC[1] which is a bit more robust and designed for reliability and industrial environments. They're very much like (expensive!) lego bricks that you can easily throw together + program. The PLC sends me a mail each morning with how much water it used, the max temperature of the water pump(I repurposed a RV water pump with a PID PWM + SSR driven from the PLC) all running from a 24v solar system. They're very much designed to be in-the-loop on systems that need to be robust with pretty extensive error report/alarms and the like. [1] https://www.automationdirect.com/productivity/p1000 https://www.automationdirect.com/productivity/p1000

IgorPartola 6y ago

I am a huge fan of feeding this kind of info into Home Assistant via MQTT. It’s a little convoluted since their data model is not what I expected it to be (each sensor has a device record, not the other way around), but overall I am able to read e.g. air quality measurements from around my house and create automations based on that. I used to get various telemetry read outs via email in the mornings and while they are nice they still require me to remember to read an email and more importantly to notice that an email is missing. A more positive feedback system is more secure: send me an alarm notification when something is wrong the one day a year that it is, not 364 notifications a year that everything is right.

sathackr 6y ago
The issue with an alarm only when something is wrong, is that you don't know that your monitoring system is working until you actually get that notification. You could just check the system every day and avoid the 'heartbeat' email, but that's likely to be forgotten/missed more often than seeing/reading the received email. You could set up a monitoring system for the monitoring system...
- Chris2048 6y ago
  > You could set up a monitoring system for the monitoring system... I'm considering this for a home automation system: a smaller, simpler device connected to the network, powered via battery (recharged from mains but surge protected) aka UPS, and able to send SMS messages via mobile network. The idea is it's a heartbeat/monitoring system for the essentials: - power cut/outage - network down/outage - main server down, or has some problem Then I can get an SMS telling me something's wrong.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  Pingdom integration or similar may be an option. There are some very cheap or free options out there. Checking from outside is not ideal though as a network outage looks the same as a sinking, a leak or any other problem.
- batch12 6y ago

dataviz1000 6y ago

I've had a novel idea from years ago. For the most part, there is no security on mega yachts. Moreover, they hire random people to wash them and maintain them. It's nothing to gain access to the all the electronics in the cave under the wheelhouse. So, the novel idea is this, a bunch of kids from MIT or CalTech or where ever decide to bug yachts. They get unassuming jobs as deckhands and stewards to give themselves time to install devices like this DIY boat monitoring system along with microphones behind all the panelling around the yachts which are owned by CEOs of major companies. More or less, the device caches all the audio recordings and waits for the ship to enter a marina where it connects to wifi and sends the information home. They are looking for stock trading information, mostly. They are in the Caribbean maybe in St. Martin and overhear some nasty things by the Russian mafia. Someone made a mistake and they get caught. That's the beginning. The rest of the novel is a bunch of nerdy kids having to MacGyver their way out of the Caribbean while being chased by the most powerful and dangerous people on Earth.

batch12 6y ago
Ha, at the beginning I read the word novel as new. I was getting a little disturbed by this until I read on to understand this was fiction. Wrong novel :). Embarrassingly, this took too long to realize...
- nexuist 6y ago
  You are not alone!
- hnnnnnnng 6y ago
  I interpreted it the same way but instead of being disturbed I searched for boat cleaning jobs and wondered how much the CIA and other intelligence agencies invest in bugging mega yachts.
  - dataviz1000 6y ago
    Here is a popular list of available jobs.[0] The site started by listing day work jobs which means a job that is only day to day. The captain usually picks up the day workers in the morning who are crew between jobs and they sand the rails, varnish, clean bilges, wash the yachts, and detail the metal work. The site lists lots of other more permanent jobs too and is a popular resource for people in the industry. > "144192 5/4/2021 Yacht Looking for 8 day workers to wash and detail yacht on Monday May 10th. 8 hours. FT LAUDERDALE" That job probably pays $15 - $20 an hour cash under the table and the chef will make them all lunch. Not a bad gig job. 8 day workers? That's a lot, they wouldn't need that many people for 120 foot yacht[1]. The price of that yacht probably starts at something like $18,000,000. It would be a nothing burger to install anything on that boat with nobody noticing. [0] https://www.daywork123.com/JobAnnouncementList.aspx https://www.daywork123.com/JobAnnouncementList.aspx [1] https://www.denisonyachtsales.com/yachts-for-sale/?brand=&minlength=120&maxlength=130 https://www.denisonyachtsales.com/yachts-for-sale/?brand=&mi...

walrus01 6y ago

One question on this, how exactly is this ESP32 email library implemented? Because I think negotiating a TLS1.2 connection, might be beyond the abilities of an ESP32. You'd need your own 'friendly' email server that is expecting traffic from that specific IoT device, allowing outbound relay through it. One of the challenges of doing outbound SMTP from randomly located IoT devices is that due to weirdness of cellular or other uplinks, it might appear from a wide range of IPs. Normally if I have some old weird monitoring device on a network that needs to send unauthenticated SMTP outbound for alerting, I can give postfix an ACL for its specific static /32, but that can't be a good solution for something like this...

avhon1 6y ago
The ESP32 can negotiate TLS1.2, using, among other options, mbedtls. https://tls.mbed.org/api/ https://tls.mbed.org/api/ > mbed TLS supports SSLv3 up to TLSv1.2
- walrus01 6y ago
  wow, well, tiny/cheap/low power stuff is certainly getting quite capable these days!

coretx 6y ago

The author may want to consider using LORA as a backup for 3g/4g for connectivity as the use of jammers by thieves and burglars becomes more common as days pass.

contingencies 6y ago

Here's someone who knows enough about electronics to design using Eagle and write firmware yet feels it's an acceptable risk to have a custom exposed board in their bilge. From a systems level critically relying on any of the following seems iffy in a marine environment where safety is key: wireless (unreliable; may be accidentally suddenly degraded by changes to outside environment), remote store and forward email notifications (unreliable and slow), single MCUs (due to SPOF), unsealed electronics in the bilge (extremely dangerous and often causes corrosion and loss of rudders), press-fit electronics (bad in marine environments, particularly near engines, due to vibration).

allene222 5y ago
Nothing is in the bilge and nothing is unsealed. It is in a NMEA 4X/ IP67 box. You are correct that all kind of things like WiFi, email servers, etc are unreliable. There is a ton of fault tolerant code in there now. Retries, exits to loops so they cannot hang. The ultimate backup is that if I don't get an email in the morning, something is wrong. That is why I send an email every day regardless of the conditions on the boat. Perhaps I should write all that up as well.