Our beautiful Aloha 32 sailboat came equipped with a state of the art LORAN system. Since LORAN hasn’t worked in more than a decade, we replaced it with a custom built monitoring, navigation, and solar charging system.
Our sailing grounds are America’s Great Lakes so while we only get a modest amount of sunshine, the cellular coverage is excellent just about anywhere our boat will carry us. The upgrades we did are part of a plan to ready to boat for long term cruising.
We went to solar to replace the energy consumed by the 12 volt refrigeration system we just installed. This beast eats up 4 amps while running so we also wanted to keep a very close eye on the batteries. To accomplish this we selected a suite of Victron products: Blue Solar 100/30 controller, Smart Shunt and a Cerbo GX.
These blue boxes are all thoughtful and well built products. They have done what Victron said they would and then some. The controller makes the most of what little sunlight we get while the Shunt has provided some very useful information.
The Cerbo makes all this work. In addition to the solar array it also monitors the bilge, the auto-pilot and refrigeration compressor. We added a small GPS puck so it can perform as an anchor watch as well. And it was the notion of an anchor watch that lead us to the network we built.
To insure that our boat is always connected to the internet we rely on a Teltonika router. The Cerbo connects to it via an ethernet cable and WIFI. At the dock the router relies on the marina’s WIFI but on the lake it uses the cell system to communicate to the VRM website.
Thanks to the VRM app on the phone and watch we can keep an eye on things afloat while we’re ashore. This will provide some reassurance that everything is ok while we are away and notify us immediately if something goes wrong.
Future plans include Mopeka sensors for the propane and grey water tanks and at least one Ruuvi for cabin temperature.
Thank you for the opportunity to brag about the system we built.
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Nice setup in this little Space!
Can you give me some Information (brand?) about the Optical isolator?
There are a lot of optical isolators in the net, but the translation from chinese to englisch sometimes makes no sense…
Greetz,
Rno
I bought the opticoupler on Amazon. It is the “VBESTLIFE” PC817 four channel. I would have preferred something in a box but I could not one. It works well thus far.
Thank you for compliment. Getting all that gear in that tight spot took some trial and error.
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Thanx for the Info.
I am going to try this part in the boat i am building.
Rno.