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The bilgeAlarm is the most important device I have created for my boat, Rhapsody. It is a device for monitoring the bilge pump(s) on the boat, sounding a loud alarm if the bilge pump runs too long, or too often. It is the result of almost sinking Rhapsody one time when the bilge pump ran, but could not be heard, until it burnt out and the boat took on 1000's of gallons of water, resulting in serious damage and a huge amount of repairs ... and time and money ... to fix the problems caused by the flooding.
This bilgeAlarm uses an ESP32 and is based on an earlier Arduino project, now lost to antiquity, that I called the bilgePumpSwitch. It uses the myIOT library for parametrization and to allow me to control and monitor it remotely. It has an SD Card to keep prodigious amounts of history about the bilge pump, and uses WS3812b leds for visual indicators, and a very loud car alarm, that can be heard above the motor running and the sound of the boat when she is underway and crashing through waves to ensure that I know if there is a problem with water entering the boat.
On these pages I will document the design of the bilgeAlarm along with how I created the hardware and software for the device and provide a rudimentary user guide for using it.
All of the source code, schematics, and files needed to create this device can be found within the docs folder:
- kicad - the kicad schematics and pcb layouts and the flatcam project and gcode files to mill and create the PCBs
- fusion - the fusion 360 design files for the plastic box
- stl - the STL files that I used for 3D printing the box
- prusa - the Prusa slicer files and resultant gcode I used to print the box
To build this project, you will need to install the myIOT library and it's dependencies. Please see that project for details about installation and building.
In addition, this project makes use of two standard libraries that can be installed to the Arduino IDE using the Tools - Library Manager:
- Adafruit_neoPixels
- LiquidCrystal_I2C
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 3 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
Please see LICENSE.TXT for more information.
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