Monitoring Vehicle Voltages

Wow!

My last post was in March!
I certainly enjoyed the summer and am looking forward to spending more time back on the bench.

I did stay tinkering during the summer with interconnecting my Raspberry Pi's with Arduino Nano's and Uno's.

The pic below shows my Raspberry Pi connected via USB to my Arduino Uno. I use the analog inputs on the Arduino to monitor the battery voltages in a couple of vehicles that I don't drive every day and to copy that up to a webpage

The small circuit board in the upper right corner is a DC - DC converter and I use it to convert 12VDC down to 5VDC for the Pi and Arduino. It is rated for 5A, so I should have lots of capacity. I've started using Anderson Powerpoles for all of my 12V circuits in my garage and ham shack for interoperability.

Having the power supply on the board also allows me to use a homebrewed POE cable so that I can power and communicate with the Raspberry Pi with one ethernet cable. 4 wires are used for communication and 4 for power (2 + & 2-),

I've also wanted to move away from the Arduino IDE because I usually spend my time ssh'ing into my devices. So I've come across an awesome program arduino-mk which allows you to edit the .ino files with your favorite editor and then use their Makefile to upload it to the arduino. I've successfully used this with the GertDuino, Arduino Nano, and Arduino Uno.

Thanks for visiting;
Robin