Thread: 1999 Malibu Wakesetter VLX (boat)

a little update. have all of the relay functions working via touchscreen. having a tiny issue with the swipe. ever once in a while it'll execute a swipe command when i tap the screen. gonna have to look deeper into the code. its not a huge issue at the moment though.

decided to explore using a rotary encoder for wedge input instead of the more complicated motorized potentiometer. It's very cool to have but it has a larger overhead during the wedge positioning. I ordered a 74xx74 ic that i'll wire up to the potentiometer to give me a square wave digital input. (for each step it'll go high/low on input 1 for ccw and high/low on input 2 for cw). this will let the arduino spend more time reading the wedge angle sensor and controlling the actuators and less time monitoring the rotary encoders for changes in position.

another issue i was having is that updating the display to match the wedge angle wasn't as clean as i would have liked and wasn't very accurate. And knowing if the ballast pumps were on/off/filling/emptying was a bit of a pain. i'd have to go to draw my attention to the screen and navigate to the ballast control screen. I decided to order up some switec stepper motors (the same ones the stock gauges use) and a couple of rgb leds. The revised plan is to replace one of the two speedos (no need for the second one) with this:

The stepper will have a needle attached to show wedge position and there will be 3 leds to give me instant feedback of the ballast pump state.

i also added control for two high current (350 amp) battery relays to 'replace' my battery switch, finilzed the code to control the lighting (nav, dash, int) as well as two thermistors to give me air and water temp readings.

I'll try to upload a wip video soon

Originally Posted by Darude

They aren`t reliable. I have one like that from Jabsco, and there is sereous problem with impeller.
Jabsco Ballast Puppy Impeller Pump Ballast System: http://www.wakemakers.com/kiss-compl...t-package.html
I want connect boat network to PC to see infromation from boat network. In my system SmartCraft MercMonitor have nmea2000 interface.
I looked to Maretron system, but it is too expensive... our local dealer calculated me about 6k usd for the system i want (pc-boat system can be fully builded on maretron product - dc relays, tanks monitoring, weather station, fluid flow sensors, pc or own display with software) .
They have nmea2000 ultrasonic sensors: http://www.maretron.com/products/tlm100.php and i think it can be used with a usb-nmea2000 adaptor and some kind of software (still searching infor about it)
My ballast bags are 50cm in height.

for your hard tanks, could you just use a fuel tank gauge? or you could build your own with an ip67 potentiometer and rod with a float on the end of it.