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We have chosen Home Assistant as the host for the smart upgrade for the boat. We use Home Assistant at home to manage things like the solar and EV car charging. At home, this is hosted on a HP rack server, of the boat, we will go with a simple Raspberry Pi 5 8GB. We also opted for HAOS to enable simple plugin additions. On the home server, I setup portainer and had Home Assistant running in a docker container. Which is great for custom installs, but not really needed on the boat install yet.

Since the boat will using Starlink for internet access it makes sense that we utilise the Nebu Casa cloud service to be able to access the Home Assistant remotely. I’m not sure how Starlink handles the public IP and with this, I don’t need to care, plus we get backups and voice assistant connection if we want to add that in the future.

Setup was a breeze, using the Raspberry Pi Imager, HAOS is built into this in the ‘other OS’ section.

We plugged the Pi into home network via ethernet to start with to set it up. The Starlink is on the boat, so for now I’ve also tethered it to my phone. Once we move it over to the boat, we will attach it to the Starlink. At some point, the Starlink will be ethernet connected to the network on the boat, but this needs to be built first. Future post. We’ve also set it up on the companion app on our iPhones which was super simple thanks to the Nabu Casa cloud service.

As we’ve said in ‘The Boat Systems’ post, power is a limited resource. So we are planning a sort of UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) which will power the Raspberry Pi and the Starlink. We have chosen the Anker Solix C200 power bank to act as the UPS as it has plenty of USB-PD ports but also a DC input which can vary from 11V to 28V. I am going to look into how I can interface with this in Home Assistant.

To enable the installation of extra add-ons that are part of the community store, We have installed HACS onto Home Assistant using the instructions found here. To use HACS, you’ll also need a GitHub account which we have.

We have a 60′ narrowboat which (in my opinion) is asking for a tech upgrade. There’s plenty of systems on board that have opportunities to be upgraded with monitoring and control tech. Some environment monitoring would be good to have as humidity levels on a boat can be all over the place, which can easily lead to damp areas.

The boat systems currently include (from back to front (stern to bow)),

• Diesel Engine
• Diesel heating system for hot water and heating
• Leisure Batteries
• AC power
• Toilet tank
• Bathroom stuff
• Lighting
• Gas oven and hob
• Fridge freezer
• Washing machine
• Kitchen sink
• Fresh water pump and tank
• Air source heat pump
• Bow thruster
• Navigation lights and horn
• Starlink

So I’d love to try and add some smarts to these systems to be able to monitor them and alert if anything is untoward. I’d also like to add solar and CCTV

Most narrowboats we have seen have some smart electrical power systems and maybe a remote start for the heating system. These usually comprise of a Victron power system which can be accessed through their app. This would do everything from battery charging and maintenance, solar control and inverting the DC to AC for mains power. For the remote heating system, Webasto (who make our diesel heater) have a GSM module that can be attached to the heater to remotely control it. This relies on a subscription to Webasto’s service, which at the time of writing is €34.99 a year.

So I think the plan is going to be to host a home assistant instance and lots sensors to monitor all the things. Then we can setup automations and alerts with remote control and monitoring. But we need to be conscious that this setup will require power, which is a limited resource on the boat.

I wanted to setup a website to document my tech adventures. So here we are. It needs a good bit of jazzing up, not too jazzy, but not WordPress basic. For now I think I’ll get some content on here and worry about aesthetics later.

I want somewhere where I can document what I’ve done, how I did it, why I did it, how I’m getting on with it and what’s next. There has been plenty of times I’ve made something or implemented something, but then I can’t remember how I did it, or why. Hopefully, this will help and maybe help anyone who reads it. If I’m lucky enough to get a comment on how someone else has done a similar thing, then that would be amazing.