Ramblings
-
Adding a gas detector
I’ve been meaning to add a gas detector to Blue Opal’s bilge area for a few years now, and finally got it done. I opted for a Pilot Mini via SVB, and wiring it in was trivially easy (though I need to re-site it due to the power cabling I had not being long enough).…
-
Battery charging changes
In 2018, I installed a ProSplit-R to split the charge coming from the alternator across the house battery bank and the starter battery. In 2019, I moved the battery banks around so that the house batteries were under the port berth, and the starter moved into the well underneath the turn in the lounge seating.…
-
Home Assistant and Zigbee2MQTT
On a Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant as-an-OS appears to run everything in Docker containers, with pass-through of USB and filesystem access. This means that things like the Mosquitto and Zigbee2MQTT add-ons are all in their own docker container. This poses a problem when the default configuration for something like Z2M is “mqtt://localhost:1883”, because it can’t…
-
Debugging power gremlins
When I went on board earlier this year, I noticed that my batteries were well below a good resting point. Blue Opal has a 55 Wp solar panel hooked up to a Votronic MPP 250 Duo Digital. With the panel left on deck when I’m not sailing, it should have kept the batteries trickle charged.…
-
A visit to the National Botanic Gardens
Saturday gone, K and I hopped on a bus to go to Ireland’s National Botanic Gardens at Glasnevin in Dublin. It’s a 10 minute walk to the terminus of the line just south-west of where I live, and about an hour on the bus to reach Glasnevin. The view from the top level of the…
-
Fixing a broken Whale pump
The other weekend, when K and I went to Blue Opal to spend the night (so we could go sailing before the club opened the next day), I used the head and pumped to the tank. There was a bong (which is normal for the tank), and then I heard water dripping. Alas, I very…