Category: RV
The Apple TV is powered by 120VAC, which is fine for a house, but I didn’t want to need to have the inverter powered up just for that. It was the one remaining piece of my RV media center that wasn’t yet 12V. Fortunately, there’s a guy out there who sells 12V retrofitted Apple TV hardware. Step 1 was to…
I finally found an acceptable clock for the trailer’s nightstand. It’s adhered to the wall next to the bed and powered by the USB charging port. Sleeping in the trailer is different than at home — few of the usual cues to hint at the time are present. Awakening in the morning, none of the familiar, regular sounds are present,…
Outside of populated areas, the radio/TV antenna on our trailer doesn’t catch much. Between dense forest and mountains a thousand feet taller than any of the broadcasting towers, the signal is effectively gone by the time it reaches one of our typical campsites. Video is a solved problem between a huge local media library and the option to stream if…
Aside from the whole-room ceiling lights, the one and only light installed in the bedroom of the trailer is a LED dome fixture directly above the head of the bed. Its rocker switch allows for one side or both sides to be on, but it is very, very bright. We never use it. I wanted something more useful and less…
One of the biggest barriers in finding a solution to a problem is knowing the right terms to search for, especially when it’s a subject of only passing familiarity. That’s me with the world of audio, and it’s what has prevented me from finding the right subwoofer for the trailer. Until now. The ceiling-mounted speakers that shipped with the trailer…
When operating from the water tank rather than a shore connection, water conservation and stretching the gray tank capacity are often goals. Adding a pressure accumulator tank to an RV’s water system creates power and water savings by reducing the run time of the pump and improves overall usage by smoothing out the water pressure when the pump cycles. RV…
I have never customized the stereo in any vehicle I’ve ever owned. Why then did I feel the need to replace the one that came in our trailer? It was that bad. The stock stereo was a Furrion DV3200 and the stock speakers three pairs of Jensen MS5006B. My issues with the setup were numerous: Unusable Bluetooth from the head…
Of the national parks, Glacier is the closest to home for us. It’s also one of the most popular, which makes planning a trip there a bit challenging. The park itself has two major home bases for tourists: West Glacier, MT at the west entrance and St Mary, MT at the east. On the east side there are also two…
I have a Synology NAS that I use in an RV media center — the model (DS116) was chosen deliberately due to its low power needs. It houses all of the content that we have available to watch while off the grid and connects into the trailer’s network. Synology does not manufacture a DC-DC power supply, only offering the AC-DC…
Satisfied with the performance and reliability of the dashboard for my Victron system, I’m finally ready to release the source code. The data collector is written in PHP and implemented as a pair of console commands within the Laravel framework, one that queries the ModbusTCP service for the bulk of the data and the other that queries the MQTT broker…
An event that the crew from Outdoors RV did at the campout this year was a seminar covering the general preventative maintenance techniques needed by the trailer’s exterior (primarily for leak prevention) and the hubs. As part of it, they brought a roof section, a wall/window section, a functional mini Schwintek slide, a wheel and hub minus the tire, a…
When planning trips with the trailer where I intend to work some days, internet availability becomes one of the driving factors. In practice, this often limits us to more popular tourist areas or urban campgrounds/RV parks for cellular access, the former of which can be hard to book, and the latter we try to avoid. Satellite internet can work around…