pi-smart-camper

The goal is to use a Raspberry Pi to provide some modern-era amenities, monitoring, and "smart-home" niceties to a vintage camper trailer.

The camper in question is a 1972 Eco fiberglass egg, which is a clone of the Boler.

I'll keep the code and necessary docs here, but put more general how-to, details and a running progress log on https://www.smartercamper.com.

Here's what's at least tentatively planned:

• Plex, with a decent-size SSD drive to store movies
• Temperature, motion and other sensors to monitor the trailer
• WIFI boosting and cleaning (VPN)
• A cellular modem to send messages if something is out of whack
• An external power button, since the Pi will be hard-wired into the trailer.
• A simple web server so I can monitor things with my phone.

The cellular modem

This is a giant pain, and I still don't know if I can actually get it to work or not. The USB modem I purchased took six weeks to arrive and came with almost no instructions. It took awhile to even figure out where to put the SIM card. Definitely not recommended. But it's what I have, and it should work. I've copied the Linux instructions found on the modem itself here, but so far I don't trust them. We'll see.

The instructions are hard to find because by default the modem doesn't want to mount on the Pi, and it doesn't appear as a USB drive, either. So that's fun.

Monitoring

External temperature: to come

Motion detection: to come

Smoke detection: to come

Internal temperature monitoring

Given a lack of ventilation, I have some concerns about CPU temp. The internal-temp.py script will allow me to monitor it and if I see it get high, I can easily add a fan for extra cooling when the temp climbs.

To-Do: have it run automatically in the background.