(#37) What a long strange trip it’s been 

 

RVs, Pandemics and Time

There are upsides to a pandemic. I’m not so callous as to gloss over the horrific impacts on people, the potential personal impact. But there are upsides. To name one, we’ve spent more time together as a family, than well, I can recall. Ever. And my kids are college age – the time when I’d expect them to be out more than in.




Another upside has been more time to work on side projects. Like making a home smarter with complex event processing (CEP) technology. So while it’s been months since I’ve written anything on this topic, it’s not been time passing without progress. Au contraire mon frère, there’s been much mischief afoot! Much raspberry-pi’ing to coin a verb.

Complex Event Processing

It was probably fifteen or so years ago when I was told about CEP technology while visiting Tibco headquarters. It was nearly ten years ago when I downloaded EsperTech’s Esper product and put together my own-non trivial project.


And as of today, my quest for a smarter home that leverages the power CEP still runs. With one tiny twist: the “home” part has become “motorhome”.

Can I make my motorhome less dumb?

Maybe.

Probably.


I've killed 12 months on this already. So let’s catch up on what I’ve done in that regard, what I’ve done to instrument the RV and leverage Esper’s CEP capabilities. There’s a lot to cover; I’ll tackle it in this order:

1. RV Phone Home - Get the RV online! Reliable internet connectivity was a challenge. When the RV sits, it sits in a storage lot with one public access point accessible. Task 1 was to assemble a WiFi extender/repeater so the RV could “phone home”.
2. With “phone home” complete, task 2 was to “Home - Phone RV” - reverse the connection. Make it so I could connect to the computers in the RV from the comfort of my home office.
3. Make one RV computer a WiFi access point. All other computers in the RV would connect to this access point.
4. Go IoT with more Sensors -- Scatter useful computers and sensor about the RV to gather data about the conditions. One would monitor the Solar Charge Controller, a second would be GPS enabled for geolocation information, a third would monitor conditions (temperature, humidity) in the coach cabin, a fourth would connect via ODB2 to the engine, and so on.
5. Use IoT - MQTT to Publish Sensor Events. Have the sensors send their values to a broker inside the RV. The bridge the MQTT broker in the RV with my MQTT broker at home, so those values could make their way back to my desktop.
6. Feed those sensor values into InfluxDB, a Time-Series Database. Use Telegraf to ingest the JSON formatted events, and Chronograf to create dashboards to display sensor data.
7. Feed those sensor values as events into Esper, our Complex Event Processing engine.
8. The coup de grâce, build up a series of Esper queries to construct “Meaningful Conclusions” from the events and patterns.

So next up – Putting the RV online.