Dreadlocks outfitting of InTech Discover

[dreadlocks]

oh wait until you start playing with like Eagle to design circuit boards, draw up full schematics.. dump all the components onto a board, and then route em all up and optimize placements.. you can use auto routing but its so much better to optimize everything by hand.. then send it off to oshpark and a few weeks later you got 3 professionally etched boards.. Ive got stacks of em heh.

Once I got everything setup, and validated.. I'll likely go design a few custom circuit boards just to clean things up and make field servicing it easier.. alot of the RPI stuff is going to be protoboard now that'll become a real board someday.

Drawing is half the fun of Electrical Engineering IMO.. at least for me, I'm a visual guy so I just stare at it and have thought experiments where I'm a lil electron just trying to go w/the flow.. the other half is building it.

 

[RandyP]

Did you ever use the second portable solar panel this summer ? Or just rely on the fixed panel ?

 

[RandyP]

........I'm a visual guy so I just stare at it and have thought experiments where I'm a lil electron just trying to go w/the flow.. the other half is building it.

Same MO here, little electron going with the flow thru power and control wiring diagram, seeing all the electrical fittings and devices in the build making sure that I have all the bits & pieces to put it together. Odd, but worked for me.

 

[dreadlocks]

@RandyP The fixed panel worked perfectly for most of the season with no need at all for the portable or genset.. May-Aug, however by the end of the summer.. Sept-Oct the sun was low enough in the sky all day long I really needed the portable panel, the low angle of attack means more canopy to cut through so more diffuse light.. even finding a spot for the portable panel was challenging as you pretty much need a nearby meadow in a forest.. an acre or bigger sized break in the trees that permitted a few hours of direct sunlight to the forest floor.. If I did not get a large enough break in the canopy, even the fixed and portable panels proved to be inadequate and I had to use the GenSet, but only for a very little bit, like 30mins.. I did have adaquate power for baseloads, so thats good.. even in October I could park somewhere and leave camp unattended pretty much indefinitely w/out worry, I need that for backpacking trips.

I see now the problem the northern latitudes complain about, even at summer solstice with the sun so far from straight overhead at high noon it would make collecting photons from the floor of any forest rather troublesome to say the least.. If one lived far enough north I would definitely suggest getting a generator BEFORE solar.. because your gonna need it.

 

[ITTOG]

I noticed the raspberry pi on your electrical diagram so I did a search to see if you ever identified what it was for. All I found was "for future use". Have you ever begin using it and if so what for?

I have thought about installing one for a camera system but man that seems like overkill and would be a waste of money even though it is so cheap.

 

[dreadlocks]

Thats new to this next phase, its gonna do a lot.. probably too much heh.

• Its going to drive a touchscreen display I'm going to flush mount to the overhead cabinets, thats going to display my system status/historical stats by default.
• The RPI is going to be wired up to VE.Direct bus on the Inverter, Solar Chargers, and Battery Monitor and get all data IO from them.
• External Sensors will be wired up to monitor temperatures, AC current, and LPG level.
• External Switching of Battery Protect Relays, Inverter, AC Power Supply
• Bunch of Scripted logic to control everything.. for example, push button.. inverter turns on, script reads wattage output from inverter.. after inverter is at 0W for more than 5min, turn inverter back off.
• APRS Digipeater with beacons including status, and emergency messages in alarm situations.
• APRS Offline Map display of all heard stations current locations.
• Emby Media Server w/1TB SSD USB HDD configured to AutoSync w/my main server when parked at home.
• Music Player Daemon Server w/Audio out to Stereo System so anyone on local wifi can browse/manage/queue locally stored music remotely.

Its all going to be homebrew, I'll probably use Telgraf/Grafana for gathering the data and likely a dashboard until I can get around to custom writing a user interface.

 

[RandyP]

Dreadlocks, have you reviewed this info. It explains why my BP-100 was a little flakey when running the battery charger current thru it backwards. I guess I'm lucky I did not start a fire with it. Limited to about 36A reverse thru the BP.

Connecting a charger to Load (Out) side of a BatteryProtect - VictronEnergy

community.victronenergy.com

 

[shade]

Dreadlocks, have you reviewed this info. It explains why my BP-100 was a little flakey when running the battery charger current thru it backwards. I guess I'm lucky I did not start a fire with it. Limited to about 36A reverse thru the BP.

Connecting a charger to Load (Out) side of a BatteryProtect - VictronEnergy

community.victronenergy.com

We've talked about it. The photo of the charred remains should be in the BP manual. Sounds like you were lucky.

 

[RandyP]

There is a figure in the BP-100 'manual' I received (Rev08 27-03-2017) with the product with some words about second battery protect.
Here's an image of figure 5:


The caution is not sufficient to warn about possible fire when running current thru the BP100 in reverse.
In my case the current was limited to what the battery charger was rated at, 40A. Measured 36A thru BP100 in reverse direction. Limited current probably saved me from a fire. There was a small voltage drop across the BP100 when charging the battery from the charger (I was surprised about this but never figured out why).
Yes, I do consider myself lucky.

 

[dreadlocks]

They updated the screen printing, they now say IN/OUT instead of BATTERY/LOAD if you noticed.

Old:


New:


Lucky for me I had a diode blocking current from the tow vehicle.. so I've never ran current backwards through mine.

 

[JohninDetroit]

@dreadlocks You may have addressed this already but 10 pages... and search comes up with nothing...

The orientation of the stove on the slide out. To me it seems it would make more sense to have it reversed. Instead of facing forward to have it facing back. Easier to access to supplies and not having to walk around the slide out etc to get to the stove. I get that it might have the camper door to contend with but if the door is closed...Also not completely covered by a awning to stay out of the elements as the front of the camper is curved and the rack cannot reach the slide out to accommodate a awning over the kitchen? I don't think this would keep me from buying one but I would prob try to flip it around to face the other way. If I'm wrong I am ready to take my "forum beating."

Thanks.

Sweet build BTW.

 

[Alloy]

I read that peole who escaped a fire say it was already raging by the time the smoke alarm woke them up so I installed 3 dual sensor fire detectors - living area
- electrical/battery bay
- furnace/storage compartment.
The detector in the living area will go off when we cook burgers something the one installed by the manufacture never did.
Also carry 3 -5lb dry chemical extinguishers.

 

[dreadlocks]

The kitchen flipped would not work out as well as you are imagining..

Supplies are easy to access either way, if you seriously cant walk a few feet you probably dont need a camper.. IF the door is closed, someone's gonna open it and its gonna hit you pretty hard.. Awning? meh.. If awning is out the kitchen is unusable, when you flip the kitchen you wont be able to open any cabinets, and you'll have to cook around the supporting arm thats going to be RIGHT in your way.. If you want/need any kind of step to get in/out, thats gonna be in the way now too.

Facing forwards, I have a built in table on front end that I setup and gives me an L shape, I can add the folding table and have a U shaped kitchen with all the counter space you could ever want for multiple cookers and all that.. I can set my water containers on the tongue and get water just w/gravity.. we boondock mostly, so no picnic tables or anything like that are provided to us. .. Is your BBQ grill on your back patio right behind a door that can hit you when you open it or is it moved off to the side somewhere out of the way so the cook can do his/her thing not in the middle of a heavily trafficked walkway? same thing applies with this IMO.

Here are some photos I found showing the kitchen/door/awning situation:

 

[shade]

I read that peole who escaped a fire say it was already raging by the time the smoke alarm woke them up so I installed 3 dual sensor fire detectors - living area
- electrical/battery bay
- furnace/storage compartment.
The detector in the living area will go off when we cook burgers something the one installed by the manufacture never did.
Also carry 3 -5lb dry chemical extinguishers.

Smart. That's why houses now have networked detectors, and aircraft have upped their monitoring to include more discrete compartments.

 

[dreadlocks]

yeah I'm planning on putting redundant alarms in the slide out cabinet area where the furnace, electrical, and LP lines are all spiderwebbed.. if I get a fire it'll start in there..

I'll be mounting a piece of ply on the surface where the Smart Solar and BP are in my previous pics.. run it all the way to the floor.. then both sides of it I can use for a wiring base.. gonna put em down there.

One thing I'm trying to avoid tho is buying a bunch of alarms at same time, cuz then the'll all expire at same time.. if going for redundancy I'd like to stagger the expiration dates, so start of next season will be a great time to put em in.

My house is split level and I upgraded to networked alarms since I'm sleeping like 4 floors from basement, unfortunately I bought em all at same time and all the co2 alarms expired right after eachother and they are not cheap..