Is My Boat Safe - An Arduino-Based Boat Monitor

The code provided as-is does not work. I am a brand new arduino user and this was quite frustrating. Required some tinkering with brackets around currentMillis and explanation with Chatgpt. Further, and this is certainly my own failing, but there is no explanation of how to build the dashboard or how to go from uploading the code to having a "thing" at all. Also, there is no explanation of what the arduino_secrets variables are for. Can you provide a tutorial or a guide on going from your code to a functioning system? It's a great project and exactly what I'm looking for but I'm really struggling! Thanks for sharing.

Hi Tom & all -- great project digging thru it now to learn arduino and your project. My boat "Starlite" is 30ft Mainship Pilot II on Guntersville Lake Tenn River near Huntsville, Al -- Want to do most of what you did and maybe add a few things like monitor fridge - other security related stuff. Something wrong with set up can't follow you via web site???? but will keep eye on your sketch. Thanks for all the work you've done. Still a novice but coming up to speed slowly

Holy cow. I have been wanting to make an Arduino-based anchor alarm, and stumbled here.... What is so holy cow-ish, however, is that I am doing this for my trawler: a 32' 1987 Kong Halvorsen Island Gypsy with twin Volvo diesels. My boat looks almost exactly like yours! This is kismet. Great project! Has there been any implementation on the boat, yet?

This is great, thanks for posting. I started building one of these a few years ago with the MKR GSM 1400 board, but got hung up with connectivity issues (I'm in a pretty dead cellular spot) ... I Also have some power issues. I switched to a wifi board (ESP8266) to test the setup. I see you have a wifi hotspot module on the desk there—I was thinking of going that route since it might be a better signal. did you try a GSM module? I'm thinking a hotspot might be better. I've been using Thinger.io as a dashboard / to compile the data. LMK if you have any thoughts on this

What a great project! So impressed ! Will be trying this here in Scotland. Many thanks for sharing this!

Congrats on a project well done, Tom! Reading about it was a joy, you covered so many angles. Thank you and... what is the next one? Looking forward to it.

Ciao, grande progetto, ma credo che il mio editor non sia all'altezza del progetto, arduino ide mi restituisce sempre l'errore della libreria softwareserial obsoleta .....hai percaso qualhe soluzione al problema?...grazie mille in anticipo ho una barca a vela da 8metri e questo progetto ci calza a pennello, se solo mi funzionasse...

Great project! I was considering a similar project for my antique Chris-Craft however my marina did not install WIFI until last year. One of the antennas is 3 ft. from the stern of my boat so now I can develop a monitor. I have a experience with the Arduino IDE however I have never attempted anything with IOT. Was there a source you used to get started? Thanks!

Wow! what a brilliant set up! Thank you so much for posting this.

Thanks for posting this. I have a similar set-up on my boat which is on the English inland waterways. I started it 8 years ago using Arduinos, and the current version uses a ESP8266 which I can communicate with either via WiFi when it is in a marina, or via SMS when it is in other places. The WiFi accumulates data using Thingspeak, which I guess is similar to Arduini cloud. Like you, I have a set-up at home as well, which I use for making and testing refinements.

Great project Tom ! I'm in the process of doing similar for my sailboat. your project has really given me some awesome ideas and insight. Very nice work and well documented !

Great job I have a boat and need a solution like yours but havent wifi can it be made with gsm and run from a cellphone ?

Congratulations ! You have done a nice work to secure your boat. Have a similar project for my vintage Skanes 575 and I will take inspiration from your project to adapt this solution to my needs. I'm new to arduino but it seems accessible and logical but could I ask you for some advice if I need it? Anyway, you did a great job. I would tell the people around me about it and I would tell you how successful my project was. Have a good day .

Hi, Tom Gohring I'm Alison from the Seeed Studio Community Team. Recently, we published the "IoT Into the Wild Contest for Sustainable Plant 2022" contest to gather marvelous solutions for solving challenges in the wild, and your project very fits our "Marine Conservation" topic, we would like to invite you to participate in this contest. We will select 27 winners to get $14,000+ prizes, and the deadline for project submission is September 27th, welcome to join us in 2 steps to win it: https://www.hackster.io/contests/iotinthewild

Great project, Tom. I would like to implement it for my boat, which we winter in a dry marina in Greece. Probably I will not need some of the functionality, so I will consider a reduced implementation, although I would like to have the possibility of GSM alarms instead (or additional) to WIFI. Hope to stay in contact and share my findings. I am new to Arduino (although I have some experience with Raspberry PIs) Luis

Ciao, grande progetto, ma credo che il mio editor non sia all'altezza del progetto, arduino ide mi restituisce sempre l'errore della libreria softwareserial obsoleta .....hai percaso qualhe soluzione al problema?...grazie mille in anticipo ho una barca a vela da 8metri e questo progetto ci calza a pennello, se solo mi funzionasse...

What a great project! So impressed ! Will be trying this here in Scotland. Many thanks for sharing this!

Wow! what a brilliant set up! Thank you so much for posting this.

Congrats on a project well done, Tom! Reading about it was a joy, you covered so many angles. Thank you and... what is the next one? Looking forward to it.

Thanks for posting this. I have a similar set-up on my boat which is on the English inland waterways. I started it 8 years ago using Arduinos, and the current version uses a ESP8266 which I can communicate with either via WiFi when it is in a marina, or via SMS when it is in other places. The WiFi accumulates data using Thingspeak, which I guess is similar to Arduini cloud. Like you, I have a set-up at home as well, which I use for making and testing refinements.

Great project! I was considering a similar project for my antique Chris-Craft however my marina did not install WIFI until last year. One of the antennas is 3 ft. from the stern of my boat so now I can develop a monitor. I have a experience with the Arduino IDE however I have never attempted anything with IOT. Was there a source you used to get started? Thanks!