Ramblings
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Jammed single line reefing
The other day I discovered the single line reefing setup on Blue Opal had jammed in the reefed position; we were able to go sailing anyway, with the reef in, and it didn’t interfere with our sailing (other than reducing the sail power in the lighter airs that were present). I figured something had jammed…
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Saltwater under the head
When Blue Opal launched this year, I opted to check all of the seacocks while she was still held in the slings. In doing so, I discovered a significant quantity of water in the space under the head, and it was salty. I called for a pause on the launching process while I checked it…
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Adding a gas detector
I’ve been meaning to add a gas detector to Blue Opal’s bilge area for a few years now, and finally got it done. I opted for a Pilot Mini via SVB, and wiring it in was trivially easy (though I need to re-site it due to the power cabling I had not being long enough).…
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Battery charging changes
In 2018, I installed a ProSplit-R to split the charge coming from the alternator across the house battery bank and the starter battery. In 2019, I moved the battery banks around so that the house batteries were under the port berth, and the starter moved into the well underneath the turn in the lounge seating.…
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Home Assistant and Zigbee2MQTT
On a Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant as-an-OS appears to run everything in Docker containers, with pass-through of USB and filesystem access. This means that things like the Mosquitto and Zigbee2MQTT add-ons are all in their own docker container. This poses a problem when the default configuration for something like Z2M is “mqtt://localhost:1883”, because it can’t…
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Debugging power gremlins
When I went on board earlier this year, I noticed that my batteries were well below a good resting point. Blue Opal has a 55 Wp solar panel hooked up to a Votronic MPP 250 Duo Digital. With the panel left on deck when I’m not sailing, it should have kept the batteries trickle charged.…