Came over to the wild side

[Wayne49]

Found the site when CRVL posted about new members spamming PMs about scams and such. The usual crowd went berserk, over reacting about CRVL unreasonably limiting members. Moderators threw mud back at the crowd. Someone mentioned the site's name making it a link.

I am not what I drive nor what I live in. Nothing interesting there.

Recently, I setup a 120VAC fridge to run off an inverter, powered by solar. The system uses an Arduino as a process controller to control the inverter's duty cycle through the inverter's remote port. Protoyped the concept with a RaspberryPi. The only physical hacking was to setup the jumper wires to switch the fridge thermostat to be a signal (using ground as the signal) to the Arduino without altering the stock wiring. Takes just a couple of minutes to switch back to stock configuration when AC power is available.

Along the way I discovered that in 1989 the RV builders (in this case, Fleetwood Tioga) did not have a good understanding of RV DC power systems. A dual battery system where the second battery only existed to 1) assist in starting the RV motor when the primary battery was drained. and 2) to start the generator. When the generator ran it never charged the primary battery, except through the charge controller, which was connected to the primary battery via 25 feet of 10AWG wire. Meanwhile the generator was direct connected to the secondary battery by 25 feet of 0/2 AWG cable. The secondary battery only was charged when the generator was running. The difficult part was realizing how wrong the system was setup in the beginning. Any assumptions that I made were so far off from the sad reality.

Thanks for the welcome.