Full LCD Gauge Replacement

[Native]

The BlueFire adater is a bluetooth device that plugs into the diagnostic port. I do not know if your engine would have any such port.

[Brad_SwiftFur]

Originally Posted by Crisfole

How difficult is it to tap into this data in a totally mechanical bus? I mean, my bus has wires and lights, but they're electronic, not digital...

Simple. You don't. There's no computer for it to read/tap into. You'd have to put in a computer for it to talk to.

[Mark Miner]

Originally Posted by Native

I have a BlueFire running ona cheap ($28.00) RCA Voyager III Android tablet. It works fine. Here is a link to a video of my screen. I originally posted this on a thread to help diagnose a "growl" that our CAT engine was making.


https://youtu.be/J9VyySGkfIM

Thank you watched the video. Looks like it is working well for you. Cheapy tablet is great idea. Can use for navigation and also to watch my victron stuff!

Mark

[cadillackid]

there are ways to build a digital dash with a mechanical bus, however it involves either buying or building a module.. and installing transducers.. a lot of work...

[Crisfole]

Thanks Christopher. I figured as much. I'll probably just stick with replacing the spedometer and installing backup/lane-change cams. Since it's double deck I was also leaning toward a 'straight ahead' cam that shows me the view from the tippy top.

[Native]

A view from the top would be interesting.

[cadillackid]

I would love to have mirror replacement cameras but in all the testing ive done,
ive not yet found a suitable solution


mirroreye has been in development for quite some time and hasnt yet been released.. they put out for field tests 2 years ago.. im sure it will be prohibitively expensive when it releases..



-Christopher

[brokedown]

I've started building pieces of my bus manager project, once I have a little code i'll share the repo in case anyone wants to collaborate on it... Although it seems like my stack doesn't match what other folks are familiar with!

[cadillackid]

are you using GO for pretty much everything? I downloaded your sample and started messing around with grabbing Live J1939 Data and displaying it.. doenst look like its goingto be too hard.. although since i already have a rude PHP script written to parse the PGN's I just have stuck with that and then feed your GO server with the data..


im liking it thus far

[Carl_Jones]

Originally Posted by DoxieLuvr2015

Wow I will be making regular stops on this thread to see new post!! Thanks everyone!

I Agree, this is some amazing stuff.

[cadillackid]

brokedown - what did you use for your webserver in your example? adding a static filehandler in the main.go results in failures of the browser websocket to actually connect.. did you server the index.html from a general NGINX or APACHE server?

[brokedown]

In my example it's hosted on one of my customer web servers... so apache was sitting in front of it, serving the index.html and forwarding the websocket connection. but it's super simple to serve the whole thing from Go if you don't have something listening already.

I should note that it's all over https, so if you're trying to do it directly in Go you'll want to add a certificate and listen on 443. I can update my repo with that code if you want, there's a super easy Go package for automatically doing letsencrypt certs.

I am planning on the server site being all Go.

[cadillackid]

Originally Posted by brokedown

In my example it's hosted on one of my customer web servers... so apache was sitting in front of it, serving the index.html and forwarding the websocket connection. but it's super simple to serve the whole thing from Go if you don't have something listening already.

I should note that it's all over https, so if you're trying to do it directly in Go you'll want to add a certificate and listen on 443. I can update my repo with that code if you want, there's a super easy Go package for automatically doing letsencrypt certs.

I am planning on the server site being all Go.

that makes some sense.. i was wondering how you were able to open a web socket with wss. and there not being an SSL server anywhere... this is admittedly my first itme really looking at go.. im trying to not have to run an apache as id like to run the whole thing on a Pi. so keep it as thin as possible.. I tried simply serving the index.html through a FileServer method which it served the page but obviously choked on the SSL portion..

[brokedown]

A+ for initiative adding in that static file handler!

I updated the code a bit. I removed the SSL requirement, added in serving of the index.html file directly, and opened it up to listen on all interfaces. Once it's running, just connect to what host it's running on via http on port 9888.

[Native]

Do you plan to use this LAN based in your rig, or via WiFi? If LAN based, the need for SSL decreases a bit.

[brokedown]

It will be over wifi. not just the interface, I'll be using esp32 modules for data gathering and video and have them connected via wifi as well. WPA2 is pretty reasonable, obviously you shouldn't allow random people onto your network. We have a guest network for when we need to share our internet connection.

[cadillackid]

im hardwiring all of my bus components.. im also prioritizing which machines run when the bus is on and off..



im not sure how many machines I will have yet.. I suppose I should run the digital dash tablets over wifi. but am considering the dahs display to just be a monitor off of a raspberry pi.. that same pi will do the data gathering for the J1939 / J1708. a pi 4 is more than powerful enough to do it..



while the bus is running I dont care about power usage, however its the shutdown / startup procedure that I want to get more streamlined... currently its a Tedious mess.. if I am just parking the bus for a few hours or maybe over night I leave my dash tablets on and they pretty much pick up where they left off..



However when I want to park in really cold weather (where I want max battery power).. then I go through the task of start-shutdown on windows and power them off.. only to start them back up when I want to drive..



the Pi 4 at idle pulls up to 7 watts of power.. if zI just turn off the screen, im guessing it will pull somewhere around that leaving all of the software programs running that gather data and display it on the nice web page brokedown created..



I can write an agent that monitors a GPIO pin for whether the bus is turned on or not which can be used to kill-off certain programs.. that would drop the idle power usage of the pi down to 3 or 4 watts (from testing)..



another option is running a "poweroff" command on the pi4 when it detects the engine has been turned off via GPIO.. this puts it into a supposedly less than 50ma@5 volts state.. thats acceptable.. you then "wake" it up by momentarily grounding the 'GLOBAL_EN' pin.. this casues the pi4 to go into full power state and reboot its OS.. if for some reason my batteries do run down (separate AGM battery for the computers).. then the OS is already "nicely" shut down so when re-applying power to the board at engine-start it will reboot.



grabbingthe engine data will be a back-end agent that writes a DB table in RAM (to avoid SD card write cycles)... the web-server-backend will read the data from the DB and send it down to the browser-display...



the virtual switch panel may use a similar set-up..

lots of work to do on this but its a ton of fun...


-Christopher

[brokedown]

One of the reasons I like the esp32 is they have arduino level power consumption. With wifi on you're sitting around 0.13A @5v or about 0.65 watts. With wifi off you're drawing 0.05A @5v. if you enable "deep sleep" mode when you turn your bus off, it drops to 0.00001A and can trigger wake via a pin. They also have 5v gpio pins where Pi can only to go 3.3v so there's a lot of things you can't just plug in. And of course they're cheap cheap cheap.

I'm planning to use external storage with the Pi as SD cards are much too fragile and I'll be doing security DVR to it as well. Pi 4 has an upgraded SD controller ad interface but it's still a far cry from a usb3 storage device and has the same write corruption problems they've always had.

[cadillackid]

isnt the esp32 more of a micro-controller? to display dashboard bits I need a Desktop style OS unless I want to complete code out my own Graphical display which im not going to do.. I need video... an esp32 makes sense for anything truly just GPIO related... sensors, outputs, etc..



most of my Data is coming from the engine and trans computers.. although I'll have at least one 1-wire temp sensor network...


fore the other side. which is the Digital switch panel also requires a display (touch screen)... that machine easily can go into a state of being powered off.. no reason for switches to turn on A/C, fans etc if the bus isnt running or at least powered on..

[brokedown]

esp32 is to get data to the collector, yeah. I'll be using one to interface with the j1708 bus as well as reading sensors from around the house and as ip cameras.

You really don't have the whole house piece to deal with, and presumably aren't adding s video security cameras.

Would you mind sharing your j1939 code? I haven't started that piece yet. I've got a MAX485 in my hand though so I may get to connecting to it today.