A hardware/software research project into the management of off-grid, autonomous sites. It collects and processes data from enviromental sensors and provides remote monitoring, control and automation.

Optionally it can also provide a host of other peripheral services that can run on the small embedded computer (wireless AP, internet connectivity, vpn remote access, tor gateway, file storage etc)

why was it made?

Since living off-grid Anton realised that he was lacking good information about the energy consumption and production, battery health and the various other subsystems of the boat.

One part of the project is about being able to better understand how those systems work by collecting, analysing and visualising their data.

The other interesting aspect is using realtime information from the sensors as well as historical data to make clever decisions and respond to external changes.

It seems that there was no free software based solution to fit my needs so Anton decided to Do It.

collecting data

At this point boattr has current, voltage, temperature and water pressure sensors. Data is collected from the sensors and stored in a db every minute. We can create real time graphs as well as mine the database for other historical data.

The heart of the system is a beaglebone black ARM embedded computer running Debian. Most of the sensors are analog and connected via a 10 channel ADC => I2c IC.

The temperature sensors are using the 1wire interface and one can read more details about the 1wire setup

Current sensing using the bidarectional allegro acs714 hall effect sensors using the breakout board from pololu

Voltage using a simple voltage divider

the software

The software part of boattr is made of a ruby module with two classes, Sensors and Data and the puppet provisioning code. The Sensors class contains all the functionality to obtain the results from the the various different sensors connected to the system.Data is responsible for processing resulting data, saving and sending to other places.

Here is an example of a box called ‘brain01’ on the boat retrieving data from the sensors, sending them to the database and real time graphs.

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#/root/boattr/boat.rb
require '/root/boattr/sensors.rb'
hostname = Socket.gethostname
p hostname

brain01 = {
  'description' => 'analog/i2c from brain01',
  'basename'    => 'boat',
  'i2cAddress'  => 0x28,
  'i2cBus'      => '/dev/i2c-1',
  'couchdb'     => 'localhost',
  'dashboard'   => 'localhost',
  'graphite'   => '10.70.60.1',
}

sensors=Boattr::Sensors.new(brain01)

brain01_sensors =
  [ sensors.current('solar',0),
    sensors.current('generator',1),
    sensors.current('lights',2),
    sensors.current('pumps',3),
    sensors.current('ring',4),
    sensors.current('fridge',5),
    sensors.voltage('batteries',6),
    sensors.waterlevel('tank',7),
    sensors.temperature('out','10-000802964c0d'),
    sensors.temperature('in','10-0008029674ee'),
    sensors.temperature('cylinder','10-000802961f0d'),
    sensors.temperature('stove','10-00080296978d'),
    sensors.temperature('canal','28-000004ee99a8'),
]


Boattr::Data.new(brain01).to_db(brain01_sensors)
Boattr::Data.new(brain01).to_graphite(brain01_sensors)

A cron job will run the above code every minute saving json formatted documents on an instance of couchdb as well as real time graphs using graphite.

Puppet is used to configure the system, install packages, configuration files and cronjobs:

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node brain02  {
  $subnet     = '192.168.8'
  $domain     = 'camp'
  $ip         = "${subnet}.99"
  $br_iface   = 'br0'
  $wifi_iface = 'wlan0'
  $ssid      = $::hostname

  class { 'dnsmasq':  subnet => $subnet, interface => $interface }
  class { 'network::ap' :  ssid => $ssid, wifi_iface => $wifi_iface }
  class { 'network::interfaces' :  }
  class { 'couchdb': }
}

The graphs look like this:

dashing is in the works.

The code is available on github

apt-get update
apt-get install puppet git librarian-puppet

cd /root/
git clone git://github.com/galp/boattr.git
cd boattr

librarian-puppet install

puppet apply --modulepath="/root/boattr/provision/modules/:/etc/puppet/modules/"  --hiera_config="/root/boattr/hiera/hiera.yaml" --verbose  provision/default.pp