Hi!
Future request for the boat page.
The GX “Boat Page” s a great glanceable driving display, but it’s built specifically around electric propulsion (com.victronenergy.motordrive) — RPM, motor temp, and controller temp. For anyone running a conventional diesel/petrol inboard, there’s no equivalent.
We tried working around this in Node-RED two ways:
- Virtual E-Drive device, to get RPM and two temperature fields onto the actual Boat Page — but there’s no oil-pressure field on that schema at all, so it either gets dropped or shoehorned into a temperature slot with the wrong unit (a bar value displayed as if it were °C).
- Virtual genset device, which does have the right fields with correct labels and units (
Engine/Speed,Engine/OilPressure,Engine/OilTemperature,Engine/CoolantTemperature) and even wires into the native low-oil-pressure alarm — but it only shows up under Devices, one tap deep. There’s no dedicated, always-visible page for it, so it doesn’t work as a driving display the way the Boat Page does for electric boats.
Since many boats running Victron systems (hybrid or pure combustion) already have this data available on NMEA 2000, it seems like a natural extension: a genuine combustion-engine equivalent of the Boat Page — a dedicated, top-level, glanceable page (not just a device detail screen) that reads standard engine/fuel/trim PGNs instead of/alongside the E-Drive service.
Requested data fields:
Engine core
- RPM
- Engine load (%)
- Oil pressure
- Oil temperature
- Coolant/water temperature
- Turbo boost pressure (for turbocharged diesels)
- Engine hours
Fuel
- Instantaneous consumption (L/h)
- Consumption per distance (L/100km or L/NM)
- Fuel level / remaining range
Trim & control
- Trim angle
- Trim tab / interceptor position, port and starboard independently
- Gear/direction (F/N/R) — already exists for E-Drive, would be good to share with combustion engines too
Other things worth considering
- Exhaust temperature
- Alternator/starter battery voltage
- Low-oil-pressure / high-temp / low-coolant alarm indicators surfaced the same way genset alarms are
- Multi-engine support (independent port/starboard readouts, similar to how dual E-Drive is already handled)
Configurable ranges/thresholds:
The E-Drive Boat Page already lets you set min/max gauge ranges for power, speed and RPM — the combustion version should get the same, plus the fields that matter most for engine safety:
- Adjustable max RPM (redline)
- Adjustable max oil pressure / min oil pressure warning
- Adjustable max coolant/water temperature
- Adjustable max oil temperature
- Ideally these thresholds double as the trigger points for the alarm indicators above, rather than being purely cosmetic gauge scaling
Most of this maps directly to existing NMEA 2000 PGNs already supported elsewhere in Venus OS (127488 Engine Rapid Update, 127489 Engine Parameters Dynamic, 127493 Transmission Parameters, 130576 Trim Tab Status), so it may mostly be a UI/mapping exercise rather than new protocol work. Happy to help test if this gets picked up.
On the performance side: the reported specs for the upcoming Cerbo GX MK3 (quad-core CPU, up from the current dual-core) should comfortably handle running this kind of setup through Node-RED/Signal K alongside everything else the GX is already doing — so hardware headroom shouldn’t be a blocker for this feature going forward. (Noting the MK3 isn’t officially announced by Victron yet as far as I’m aware — just going off community info — so happy to be corrected if that’s off.)
For reference/precedent: Boat Page - got it working just fine…but? covers essentially this same page from the electric-drive side — RPM and temperature data got added there in 3.80 following that thread’s feedback. This post is the combustion-engine mirror of that same ask, just on the other half of the Boat Page’s target audience.
@citolen — you were the one who picked up the motor/controller/coolant temperature request in that thread and got it into 3.80, so figured you’d be the right person to flag the combustion-engine side to as well.
@mpvader as well, since you’ve written up every Boat Page/Node-RED release note so far (3.60 launch, 3.70’s Node-RED virtual switches and Boat Page improvements) — curious whether combustion-engine support is anywhere on the roadmap.
