In my previous blogs about the VanAssistant i showed you that it is wise to assemble a nice good case around your Raspberry Pi. We configured that Raspberry PI with an m2 SSD in a NAS case. That case has room for ventilation, a fan and less important some nice lights. The blog after that I configured a router to be used with the RaspberryPi. I opted for a RUTX50 from Teltonika.

The VanAssistant project is not going that well. Not to much related to technical issues, but more or less relative based. I will not dive deeper into this, but we had some strange weeks going on. When starting the project VanAssistant I wanted to have everything running over MQTT. It is the reason to change my router to the Teltonika. I must admit, it was heavy to get things working. But i managed being able to communicate with the router… But not how it should be…

The what? Ok. The Teltonika RUTX50 is an industrial grade router with good, very good characteristics for a CamperVan. I have choosen this one because: 5G network availlable Two sim slots Good Wifi Coverage Has 4 lan ports Running on OpenWRT (!) Several specific packages like TravelMate, MQTT and more Power range from 9 to 50V, which means you can connect straight to campervan power (with a fuse off course.) Next to that, I could buy a new one at a good price.

Lets make a first start of the VanAssistant today. What are going to do? We are going to prepare a Raspberry Pi (4 or 5) to become a VanAssistant server. I call it VanAssistant now because we will adapt some settings on the hardware to make sure that we can control a lot of stuff in our CamperVan/Mobile home or RV or whatever we call them. This setup will also work in various other situations where your Home Assistant must run independent of where it is.

A short one today. I have had a non humourous last year. My family and me went through some deep holes as we call them. Real friends know what all happened and I would like to keep it that way. Time to leave that behind. I want to start something new. Last year I switched teams. Now I am in team that does a lot of Azure related services around Data and Analytics.