RV Control

Note: This Ruby implementation is no longer being developed. Please see RVC-Monitor-Py for the Python implementation.

This project's goal is to enable two-way communication between an RV's CAN bus network and an MQTT message broker. It is not meant to be an end-to-end RV control or automation solution, but rather a foundation which other tools and projects can be built upon.

This is a from-scratch rewrite of some of the components of CoachProxyOS.

Download the complete RV-C specification for details on the protocol and its messages. This PDF file is critical for understanding how to communicate with RV-C devices.

What it does

Monitoring:

• Receives raw RV-C messages from the CAN bus.
• Decodes those messages into human-readable JSON objects according to the RV-C specification.
• Decodes additional, vendor-proprietary RV-C messages (currently just a few custom messages used by Spyder Controls).
• Publishes decoded messages to an MQTT message broker.

Controlling:

• Receives commands from the MQTT Broker.
• Encodes those commands into RV-C messages.
• Sends the messages onto the CAN bus.

What it does NOT do

• Interpretation of messages (e.g. this message means "Hallway Light").
• Any kind of logic (e.g. do something when a certain message is recevied).
• Any kind of user interface.

This and other functionality will be developed as a separate project.

System overview

The yellow area outlines the scope of this project. Other example components may be developed at a future date.

Requirements

• A computer with a CAN bus network card. This will almost always be a Raspberry Pi 3B computer with a PiCAN2 board. Install the canbus utilities:

  sudo apt -y install can-utils
  

  Add the following to the end of /boot/config.txt to enable the canbus card:

  dtparam=spi=on
  dtoverlay=mcp2515-can0,oscillator=16000000,interrupt=25
  dtoverlay=spi-bcm2835-overlay
  

• The latest Raspberry Pi OS operating system image (Buster Lite is used for development).
• The Ruby development environment and supporting Gems:

  sudo apt -y install ruby-dev
  sudo gem install json yaml mqtt
  

• An MQTT message broker to communicate with. Often this will run on the same Raspberry Pi, and can be installed easily:

  sudo apt -y install mosquitto
  

Component Documentation

• RV-C Monitor
• RV-C Control