Kazetsukai's Build

[Native]

Originally Posted by kazetsukai

I have to give a shout-out to AllState, insuring the little one was very easy to add on. Its registered, title is on its way, insured, and the shop is looking at it now. Anyone know how to repair auto upholstery? For the seat I think I'll just put a new cover on it, but I'd rather not have the ceiling coming down on me.
Attachment 43632

We purchased this at JoAnn Fabrics and Crafts ... it is available from their online store for $21.99.



There is no manufacturer listed on the can AT ALL. It works well as long as you follow the instructions. I have even used it to hold down an area rug on the tile entry. I "jog" inside (I dislike jogging in the cold or wet) and this rug would slide. I sprayed this on the tile then put down the rug. I can jog on it, even making the turn at the door and it sticks. I have had it adhered for years.

[kazetsukai]

Some progress today- solar and plumbing.

I was up on the roof doing the solar, my helper did the plumbing work. He's the guy behind most of the actual carpentry in my build. I'm not great at turning ideas into wood, admittedly.

Plumbing:
I've had most of the plumbing work done for a while now, and I'm now ironing out some bugs in that. But what wasn't completed was the drainage. During my days in the bus using my sink, etc- I've been draining to the ground. Well, I finally decided to get the final runs of plumbing into the grey tanks.

The result:

Air line I put in a week or two ago.

I put in a diverter valve for the shower in case there was a convenient place to use it wherever I parked. As I intend to plumb in the liquids from the composting toilet (and/or maybe... replace it with a black tank... ugh), I didn't want my greys filling up with shower water needlessly.

I have the one sink in the bathroom left to plumb in. And the pee. Maybe. I'm on the fence about the toilet.

Anyway, as all we're draining is soapy water at this point, I just gravity feed down the hill for now.


If I do plumb in the nasty-nasty I will use a macerator pump to run to my septic.

Solar:
All 3050W is now finally on the roof. Whew.


It wasn't easy. The rail got in the way at several junctions, and nothing is ever straight on this bus. The combiner box is now full, save for one last input circuit. NO- that's not me connecting positive to negative at the end. Its a conductor-less plug to prevent water from getting in.


Last worry is that the solar is just too high off the roof, and that I'll need to install wind guards down the length of the bus. I'm pretty sure that could be as simple as some properly sized flashing? The strut turned out to be a great channel to tuck all the wiring away into.


Even with the 3kW up top, I'm not sure I'm going to actually see a change in yield, because on a sunny day this will charge my batteries (10kWh) from zero to full, and 1800W was already enough to offset my nightly usage in the first hour of good sun. I'm on the bottom edge of what I calculate I'll need for AC/heat with a single day of overcast so at this point I need more capacity.

The cats love the bus. I was worried they'd cry or be cramped- they love the views through the front and rear windows and climb all over the place.

[Native]

Man. lots of progress.


The shot of the pipes in the underside make them look like they are about to scrape the ground. I know (from reading your thread) that this is not the case.

[kazetsukai]

Our test run continues and more empty/raw sections of the bus are getting filled out with things- tools, utensils, knick-knacks.


A showstopper for us unplugging from the house has been the new 48V inverter. Once the high speed fans kick on, its on and will not turn back off. This created an unacceptable amount of noise in the cabin. I considered tinkering with it, replacing it with a centrifugal / blower style fan internally, etc. There's even a WiFi board available for these that can manage fans for you. I ended up removing it from the electrical cabinet.


The additional space is nice. I need to reorganize now that the mammoth isn't there. Well, as for my "solution", I utilized my yet-unused underbay storage I added near the beginning of the build.


Battery cables and 120V/240V cables go down through the floor via a bulkhead. Its an uncomfortably long run of 2 AWG (I'd say 10ft, 4 cables, two per pole) but aside from consistent loads over 2kW I think it should be fine. I weep over replacing my 4/0 cable, which was too short to make the run.... maybe I'll replace it later.


2 AWG is what is coming from the single series of batteries anyway so it isn't getting any better any time soon. BMSes are performing admirably and the SoC meter using shunts is proving its utility. Definitely easier to look at a percentage bar than keeping track of input/output.


Our sun tracking equipment is also working wonderfully, although sometimes it lags a bit or behaves erratically.


I just wish they wouldn't knock stuff off the shelves onto me at night.

[Phatman]

You are making some great progress K. How close are you to calling it complete?

[kazetsukai]

Originally Posted by Phatman

You are making some great progress K. How close are you to calling it complete?

The house needs _way_ more work than the bus.

I'm a little nervous as to the mechanical aspect- I definitely want to take this into my local Freightliner to have basic fluids, etc changed, and have a look over.

There's one unfinished closet, we need a place for silverware and some drawers up front need to be built. Plumbing completely finished yesterday, although we identified a potential backflow issue I need to mitigate with a check valve.

[kazetsukai]

Originally Posted by Native

We purchased this at JoAnn Fabrics and Crafts ... it is available from their online store for $21.99.

I figured out why all the upholstery was coming down the other day when water started dripping on me from the sun visor.


Its not getting glued back up, its all coming out.

[Native]

Originally Posted by kazetsukai

I figured out why all the upholstery was coming down the other day when water started dripping on me from the sun visor.


Its not getting glued back up, its all coming out.

I hear ya on that note! Gotta get after it before it becomes a real problem. You can always paint it.


In the picture of your kitchen sink above, I could not help but notice how close the window is to the sink edge. Do you have a splash-guard planned to keep water fromgetting down in your walls after hitting the window and sheeting down?

[Phatman]

Originally Posted by kazetsukai

The house needs _way_ more work than the bus.

I'm a little nervous as to the mechanical aspect- I definitely want to take this into my local Freightliner to have basic fluids, etc changed, and have a look over.

There's one unfinished closet, we need a place for silverware and some drawers up front need to be built. Plumbing completely finished yesterday, although we identified a potential backflow issue I need to mitigate with a check valve.

I hear ya on the house. Don’t be nervous, it’s only money !!

[JackE]

Thanks. The more I read here and plan my bus, the more I realize how stinkin lucky I am to have landed this set up for so dang cheap! So far I have collected about 75% of my materials for free, or from an old donor motor home I picked up about 15 years ago. I think in the end I will easily have less than $10 grand in a completed bus. I’m stoked! Can’t wait for retirement in a year so I can work on it full time.

[kazetsukai]

Originally Posted by Native

I hear ya on that note! Gotta get after it before it becomes a real problem. You can always paint it.

Spray adhesive was a pretty good idea, though. I just worry about rot/mold or other nasties since the problem has been ongoing for a while.

Shorty build thread starting probably next weekend. Its going to be a utility build with the bare minimums done for now. Post-move I may revisit, just a heads up.

Originally Posted by Native

Do you have a splash-guard planned to keep water from getting down in your walls after hitting the window and sheeting down?

Nah. The sink is deep, I'd rather not cover the window. If anything, we need a splash guard near the cooktop, but it can be mobile.

Originally Posted by JackE

The more I read here and plan my bus, the more I realize how stinkin lucky I am to have landed this set up for so dang cheap! So far I have collected about 75% of my materials for free, or from an old donor motor home I picked up about 15 years ago.

As much as I don't like the balsa-wood constructed motorhomes out there, pilfering one is actually a great idea in retrospect.

My build is pricey for sure. No upcycling, its all shiplap, finish wood and butcher block. Anyone have a guess how heavy this is? I still need to get weighed.

Originally Posted by JackE

I think in the end I will easily have less than $10 grand in a completed bus. I’m stoked! Can’t wait for retirement in a year so I can work on it full time.

If you can source materials cheaply you probably can do it. Congrats on your soon-to-be retirement, hoping I wont be stuck in the rat race much longer either.

[kazetsukai]

Kitchen is slowly being populated with stuff. Big addition was this rack:


Little bit of a tradeoff- I can't fully open the drawer anymore. I find this acceptable as stuff in the back is low frequency use items.


We redid security a bit, used a lock technique on one of the doors I saw in another build.


Now on to some bad news on the energy side!


(I'm not really at 1-2% cap, they're still calibrating SoC)

Having done the SBMS0 integration, I figure I have somewhere between 6.4kWh -> 7kWh of usable capacity with my current batteries. Kind of a bummer. I sort of announced it elsewhere, I intend to migrate to different battery tech.

The killer for me isn't so much the chemistry as it is the inflexibility. These Tesla packs come in 6S configuration and that's it. I need something more along the lines of a 7S or 8S, (well, now that I've stepped up to 48V, 14S-16S) and I need to avoid parallelization at the pack level if I want them to scale. I figure to really power my uses off grid indefinitely, I need something like 30kWh.

One way or another I'm going with something where I can build a pack out of individual cells. Ideally something like:
https://www.amazon.com/LiFePo4-100ah...943514&sr=8-15

Nissan Leaf batteries provide similar advantages.

Moving on, to the good news, energy-wise.
Most of the time my AC side usage looks like this (heat on):


When my microwave or coffee maker kicks on:


All in all, the heat kills me the most. 700W is constant on average. Not bad! But I need more capacity for it. I can't run heat overnight, but I can turn it on at first sun, which is what I did this morning. The current bank is sufficient for _everything_ else- fridge, microwave, induction cooktop. Lights. Morning coffee. Laptops and twin 4k TVs to do work with- all of it. The inverter is LF and doesn't even flinch. The only missing ingredient is the near bottomless capacity needed for climate control- so I'd call this all a success.

[TheArgobus]

If I were in your position, and looking for a new battery pack, I'd pick up a bunch of these (https://www.electriccarpartscompany....PO4?redirect=1) and pick up the rest of the gear from them as well (BMS, balancers, etc). I bought my lithium pouches from my colleague who imported them and built his own 28kWh lithium pack for his toy hauler. He says he can run his whole home off solar no problem, which I don't doubt, but I personally think the way he wired the cells up with threaded rod isn't very efficient. Here's his pack here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13lE...ature=youtu.be

[kazetsukai]

Originally Posted by TheArgobus

If I were in your position, and looking for a new battery pack, I'd pick up a bunch of these (https://www.electriccarpartscompany....PO4?redirect=1) and pick up the rest of the gear from them as well (BMS, balancers, etc). I bought my lithium pouches from my colleague who imported them and built his own 28kWh lithium pack for his toy hauler. He says he can run his whole home off solar no problem, which I don't doubt, but I personally think the way he wired the cells up with threaded rod isn't very efficient. Here's his pack here:

Looking at their BMSes- 6A balancing, unlimited number of cells- WOW! Yeah, I'll be coming back to this post for reference for sure.


Thanks man, that's gold.



Its likely going to be after I sell my house I pull the trigger on a new bank. I'm happy with my results, disappointed but not surprised by climate control. Its hard to get right.

[dzl_]

I'm curious to learn more about your automation.

How is everything controlled at the hardware level? Are those little blue banks of what look like solid state relays what you are using to control everything? What controls them?

What are you using to control everything (hardware and software)?

Is this type of project something you've had experience with in the past or is this a new endeavor, any resources you've found particularly helpful?

[kazetsukai]

Originally Posted by dzl_

I'm curious to learn more about your automation.

Originally Posted by dzl_

How is everything controlled at the hardware level?

A Ryzen 3200g is at the center of it all. Plugged into it::

• A DIY Joystick Controller for arcade cabinets (USB).
• An Arduino MEGA 2560 (USB).
• My Victron MPPT Charge Controller via a VE Direct USB cable
• A small digital amplifier to speakers in the bus (USB)
• The touchscreen in the cabinet (USB, DisplayPort)
• Each SBMS0 is connected to it via USB.

A high level overview of how things work: The buttons on my walls are wired back to the electrical cabinet with a 4 conductor wire. Two power the light on the button, the other two go to the DIY Joystick Controller to sense those button presses. The computer runs my automation suite, autonomy. Autonomy watches for button presses- when one comes through it generates an event noting the source, button number, and state (up or down). An event listener watching for events in autonomy looks at my configuration file each time an event comes by, and tries to find a matching task to run.

Press the button in my hallway and let go -> two events are generated: button_11_down , button_11_up. Config file is read through, the listener finds this:

• on(button_11_up).toggle(hallway)

Listener looks through the config file's list of groups, finds:

• group[hallway] = A1_11, A1_12, A1_13

Those numbers: A1 corresponds to which Arduino board I want to talk to. I only have one right now but this is rather important because some of the sensors in my build will probably have to use WiFi and I make no distinction between WiFi / USB. 11, 12, 13 are pin numbers on the Arduino board that correspond to the light(s) I want to control. So in short this becomes:

• button_11_up
• toggle the hallway
• toggle each of (11, 12, 13) on board A1

This means I could in theory change my hallway light switch to turn on the bathroom light, or my water pump for that matter- which button corresponds to which appliance is a software concern, they aren't hardwired.

Anyway, the Joystick controller is an Event source. The Victron MPPT is an Event source. The SBMS0 is an Event source. And I can choose how to react to any Event, so its all very flexible.

Originally Posted by dzl_

Are those little blue banks of what look like solid state relays what you are using to control everything?

Those aren't solid state, they're clickety-click relays. Could change them out I suppose.

Originally Posted by dzl_

What are you using to control everything (hardware and software)?

Everything is configured via autonomy. I hope to expand autonomy to suit the needs of anyone, not just myself. It consists of a web application (yeah, anything you can control via events you can control via HTTP/REST) and a communication layer for Arduino called JSONLink. So even if you're not a Java developer like I am, you the Python developer can let autonomy handle the hardware aspect and just use REST to control everything. Groups in my simple, simple web app:


The other big thing autonomy delivers by being event-driven is that all events get saved to a database. So you can query event history. Currently for me this means I can get the statistics for the day of my Victron controller, but you can find out everything, down to who or what event resulted in an action ("group hallway was activated when we received a button_11_up event at 7pm EST").

One can also generate aggregate events. Okay, so every hour, look at the last hour of MPPT data and tell me if the batteries are trending upwards, downwards, or more or less the same. Make an event: 30min_battery_bank_a_rose(2 Volts). Something can now react to that, like, if the water tanks are below a certain level for a period of time, turn off the pump.

I started integrating text-to-speech as well for announcements over the speakers. That's hard to get right- need something akin to a human presence sensor to tell me when to do verbal announcements.

Originally Posted by dzl_

Is this type of project something you've had experience with in the past or is this a new endeavor, any resources you've found particularly helpful?

New. I made a prototype on a raspberry pi when I first got the bus with the goal of controlling the air door. It was pretty simple and worked well.

[kazetsukai]

The config file:


Top level overview. I only have one Arduino board, so here is what you see:

• connectorId : The Board Id. "A1" in the previous post. Its long, but auto-generated. Unique.
• appliances: List of pins on the Arduino by number, and a name for them.
• controlMap:
  • The key '1:0' means "button ONE(1) UP(0), or when I let go of button 1.
  • The value is a list of appliance names.
• Button 1 release controls both the left and right side office lights.
• Button 0 release controls the bathroom.
• Button 5 release controls all the lights in the kitchen.
• So on.

I would like to make a pretty GUI for it all but I'm not a web designer! Recruiting, though.

[dzl_]

This is very cool! I'm impressed.

I am especially excited by the ability to take actions based on data from the Victron MPPT. Was this difficult? I've heard the VE.direct protocol is pretty simple but I'm not a programmer--so simple is a relative term. One of the reasons I like Victron is that they are fairly supportive of open source solutions, and seem to be ahead of the pack in terms of communications. I am considering using a raspberry pi running their VenusOS operating system, which is linux based, and used for their high end $$$ system monitors. I doubt it could be anywhere near as flexible as your system, but its also probably much simpler to install/administer. But now you've got me daydreaming about a custom system like yours.

My mind is racing with the possibilities of how your software could leverage data from the SBMS and the MPPT controller. A lot of potential there! I'm imagining intelligently switching certain loads on and off based on state of charge, time of day, temperature, charge current, maybe even location based triggers, etc.

Regarding the relays, probably no pressing reason to change to solid state unless the relays themselves consume too much power.

My guess is that the Ryzen 3200G was chosen for other reasons than running the Autonomy software. Could this system be run off something much lower power like a Raspberry Pi?

I am very excited to see how this software and system of yours develops! I think it has a ton of potential.

[sproutroot]

so this just became my new favorite place. you explained that so well! and I freakin love the modularity!

Originally Posted by kazetsukai

New. I made a prototype on a raspberry pi when I first got the bus with the goal of controlling the air door. It was pretty simple and worked well.

[kazetsukai]

Originally Posted by dzl_

I am especially excited by the ability to take actions based on data from the Victron MPPT. Was this difficult? I've heard the VE.direct protocol is pretty simple but I'm not a programmer--so simple is a relative term. One of the reasons I like Victron is that they are fairly supportive of open source solutions, and seem to be ahead of the pack in terms of communications. I am considering using a raspberry pi running their VenusOS operating system, which is linux based, and used for their high end $$$ system monitors. I doubt it could be anywhere near as flexible as your system, but its also probably much simpler to install/administer. But now you've got me daydreaming about a custom system like yours.

First thing I did there was write a library to talk to VEDirect devices. The way it is done makes getting events rather simple, you can see from the examples on the page:


https://github.com/kazetsukaimiko/victron-java


To write this library, I just referenced the PDFs Victron provided about the protocol:
https://www.victronenergy.com/live/v...t_protocol:faq



The MPPT sends one event per second. Autonomy records all of these, so since installation the database has gotten rather big:

ls ~/.config/autonomy

-rw-r--r-- 1 autonomy autonomy  36G May  8 19:25 NitriteVEDirectMessage.db

If you're savvy with Linux and the command line, you could use Autonomy only to record VEDirect data for query. There's a REST endpoint:


http://localhost:8080/rest/vedirect/device/{YOUR_MPPT_SERIAL_NUM}/last/10/days

or

http://localhost:8080/rest/vedirect/device/{YOUR_MPPT_SERIAL_NUM}/last/1/minute


To get the last 10 days, or 1 minute, of data, which is all I've needed. It would be stupid easy to add full search to that.


What each message from my MPPT contains:

VEDirectMessage{
product=SMARTSOLAR_MPPT_150_100_REV2, 
relayState=OFF, 
firmwareVersion='146', 
serialNumber='HQXYZABC433S', 
mainVoltage=24.480 V, 
mainCurrent=0.000 A, 
panelVoltage=30 mV, 
panelPower=0 W, 
stateOfOperation=OFF, 
trackerOperation=OFF, 
loadOutputState=ON, 
errorCode=NO_ERROR, 
offReason=NO_INPUT_POWER, 
resettableYield=279.73 kWh, 
yieldToday=0.00 Wh, 
maxPowerToday=0 W, 
yieldYesterday=30.00 Wh, 
maxPowerYesterday=21 W
}

If you use VEDirect with your inverter or other Victron device, the fields will be different. I support all fields documented in Victron's PDFs. And yeah, you can plug in any number of VEDirect devices and it will record events for all.

Originally Posted by dzl_

But now you've got me daydreaming about a custom system like yours.

Again I'd love to make this into something that can help others... let me know if you want to give it a whirl, I can try to put something together. Ease of installation has been a recent focus.

Originally Posted by dzl_

temperature, charge current, maybe even location based triggers, etc.

Whoa, you read my mind on location triggers...
https://github.com/kazetsukaimiko/au.../GPSEvent.java


I was thinking of detecting what town one was in, and searching for nearby services like hospitals, restaurants, etc to have handy on a display.

Originally Posted by dzl_

My guess is that the Ryzen 3200G was chosen for other reasons than running the Autonomy software. Could this system be run off something much lower power like a Raspberry Pi?

It can run on anything with the RAM needed, I'd say 512MB is the lowest you'd want to go. It would start slow but run quick.




I have a Pi in my cabinet but I don't use it because.... text-to-speech is expensive. It took 2-10 seconds for a Pi like system to play an audio notification, too slow for me. So yeah, I had this running on a Pi no problem, just it takes about a minute or two to start up because SD cards are slow animals.