My Coachmen Crossfit came with unreliable tank sensors. Garnet SeeLevel tank sensors integrated into my DIY camper monitoring system would be a big improvement.
My current monitoring system is centered around MQTT and Node-Red running on a Victron Cerbo GX and a Nextion touch screen, with ESP32's where needed for reading sensors and communicating between devices.
Options for integration include buying a SeeLevel control panel with any of Bluetooth, RV-C, or NMEA2000 interfaces, the latter two of which directly interface with Victron's Cerbo units and/or Raspberry Pi running Victron's OS.
Reading the sensors/sending units directly, without the Garnet control panel also seems to be possible - based on
this post in a Raspberry Pi forum, where one of the participants (Jim G) figured out how to trigger and read the tank sensors/sending units directly.
I bought a couple of SeeLevel sending units and successfully dummied up a test using an ESP32 to trigger and read the sending units and a circuit similar to the one designed by Jim G. in the Raspberry Pi forum. It's working on the bench with two SeeLevel sensors attached to a water jug.
It's too cold to work out in the camper, so I'll not know if it's reliable in the real world until it gets quite a bit warmer. In the meantime, I've rearranged my display to accommodate tank gauges (lower left corner):
I figured I could either use (boring) green bars to show tank levels, or an appropriate set of emojis.
My code and a description of the circuit are uploaded to
Github. To fully integrate the sensors, I'll need to modify my code to encapsulate the data into JSON formatted ESP-NOW packets, and come up with an algorithm to properly interpret the data (likely in Node-Red).
I'd also like to put a bit of protection on the 12v circuit feeding the sensors. I'm not sure how tolerant they are of voltage spikes and anomalies. I've no idea how to do that though.
Integrating Garnet SeeLevel sensors into DIY van monitoring
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