I’d like to announce an exciting new project that we’ve begun work on here at This Smart House – a Smart RV!
Here’s the idea: Let’s take an RV that’s seen better days, renovate it from the ground up and completely re-think it using all the latest and greatest in DIY smart-home technologies. Then, let’s take all that hard work and make it into a bunch of smaller IoT projects and give them to our readers as individual open source projects!
In the coming weeks and months you can expect a whole slew of content, how-tos, code, bills of material and projects surrounding this vehicle as we work to increase the microchip-per-square-foot ratio. To get started, here’s the stats:
Make: Gulfstream
Model: Ultrasport
Year: 2000
Miles: 43,000
Purchase Price: $1,500
When I picked up this RV, I purchased it off of a woman who flipped houses for a living. When she purchased it, apparently the roof was leaking badly and the interior was destroyed. Her intention was to simply renovate it, but after spending thousands on a brand new roof and realizing the effort involved she decided it wasn’t something she was going to be able to get done so she sold it to me. Here’s the condition of the interior when I purchased it:
I’m already well on my way in this project, and have a ton more pictures, code, and devices to share but I wanted to get the ball rolling by announcing it. It’s worth noting we also have a partner in this project, LiFeBlue Battery, who make some really great LiFePO4 deep cycle batteries with bluetooth monitoring built in. Thanks to their support, those will be the batteries that power our rig — and we’ve even built a ESP32 based interface that let’s us pull that data into our smart hub! More on that later though (trust me, much more). Stay tuned!