Building Home Automation for a Campervan
A smart home lets you see and control everything from one place. A campervan usually doesn't. The lights are on one switch panel, the battery monitor is on another, and checking how much solar you're getting means crouching down next to the charge controller.
We're building a home-automation system designed for campervans to fix that: power, lighting and controls, all managed from one place.
Where the idea came from
This project started with Dave. A passion for hiking and travelling means a lot of time on the road and a lot of nights parked up somewhere remote. That's exactly where a van's power and controls matter most, and where juggling separate panels and gauges gets old fast. So we decided to build something better.
We're a good way into it now, and Dave will be the first guinea pig to test it out on the road.
Why not just use smart-home kit?
Smart-home products assume things a van doesn't have: mains power, plenty of space and a steady Wi-Fi network. A campervan runs on a leisure battery, has every centimetre spoken for, and is often parked somewhere with no signal at all.
So rather than squeezing household kit into a van, we're designing the system around the power, space and setup a campervan actually has.
The plan
The build is split into five stages:
- System design: working out what the system needs to monitor and control in a campervan. (Done)
- Hardware: building the controller and the electronics that connect to the van.
- Power monitor: an ESP32 board that tracks the leisure battery, solar input and power use, and feeds it into the system.
- Software and controls: the automation itself and the interface for running it.
- Fitting and testing: installing the system in a van and using it for real.
Where we're up to
The system design is done, so we know what the system has to look after. Next is the hardware: the controller at the centre of it all, and the electronics that connect it to the van.
The power monitor is the part we're most looking forward to. Knowing how full the battery is, and how much the solar is putting back in, decides how long you can stay off-grid. Having that in the same place as the lights and controls is the whole point of the project.
Follow the build
The Campervan project page on the Workshop site is updated as each stage is finished. We'll write up the bigger steps here on the blog, including the bits that don't work first time.
Got a van build of your own, or a feature you'd want in a system like this? Tell us about it.