Onboard Alarm Panel

[Mal Reynolds]

I'm designing an alarm panel for when aboard, a place to consolidate separate alarms and wondering if I'm missing some ideas and maybe ways to design some alarms. Here is my alarm list so far:

Man Overboard (triggered via AIS MOB device)
High Water in Bilge (triggered by pump switch)
Propane (Triggered by sensors in galley and bilge)
Water in Fuel (Racor sensor)
Fire Alarm (sensor in engine room)
Stray Current test (for the aluminum hull)
Low voltage

I'd like to add an anchor alarm, not sure how to do this.

Smoke and CO alarms are near sleeping quarters.

What other alarms should I think about? I'm not really interested in wind or course change alarms. Although maybe a rapid barometric pressure drop.

When off the boat I guess all these sensors should also be wired into a monitoring system - Cortex? so I'm notified when off the boat, but I haven't really thought this through.

[Bellinghamster]

exhaust overtemp
engine overtemp
low oil pressure
proximity alert (AIS, Radar)
shallow depth
off-course / heading
high windspeed
watch timer / alarm clock
uninvited "guests" boarding
someone is stealing my dinghy
anchor drag (position, possibly depth shallow/deep thresholds)
start of happy hour (of course, only enabled when the anchor alarm is set!)

[Bellinghamster]

Anchor alarm - most modern chart plotters and even some old GPSs had an anchor watch alarm. Set a "ring" (distance) around current position and the alarm goes off if you venture outside it. Device model will determine what format the alarm output is in.

Some depthsounders have similar capabilities via a shallow alarm and a deep alarm, again, might just be a local beeper in the depthsounder, might be output on a wire or in a datastream.

Reading your original post again, I'm not clear if you're proposing to make a "dumb" alarm panel that aggregates and displays alarms generated by other devices onto one panel, or if you're wanting something with logic (i.e. a microcontroller or computer) that could monitor data (NMEA 0183, 2000, etc.) and determine alarm conditions based on defined setpoints. There are ESP32 and Raspberry Pi projects out there already that'll give you a head start. Maybe a Signal K dashboard?

[Mal Reynolds]

Originally Posted by Bellinghamster

Reading your original post again, I'm not clear if you're proposing to make a "dumb" alarm panel that aggregates and displays alarms generated by other devices onto one panel, or if you're wanting something with logic (i.e. a microcontroller or computer) that could monitor data (NMEA 0183, 2000, etc.) and determine alarm conditions based on defined setpoints. There are ESP32 and Raspberry Pi projects out there already that'll give you a head start. Maybe a Signal K dashboard?

I'd like to aggregate these different alarms to one location so a crew member relatively new to the boat can go to one location and see what's making the noise and what the problem is. I think NMEA2000 some of this, but not all. Propane leak? Water in Fuel? High water? Fire? PGNs for these or can I configure dummy PGNs?

I currently have specific sensors and devices that alarm for these conditions but they are not on a network (and in different locations). Engine displays and indicator lights are at the helm, Cerbo GX for Electrical, NMEA2000 for some, and then these separate and critical alarms. It feels like a mess, but maybe someone has sorted this out?

Maybe Signal K is an answer, so maybe I need to go down that rabbit hole.

[Jammer]

Alternator fault
BMS alarm
Low fuel


There are NMEA2000 devices on the market that accept a bunch of analog inputs and contact closures.

[boatpoker]

We have 6 alarms on our boat.
It really ticks me off that they all sound the same. How hard is it to have a standard that requires different sounds for different types of alarms ?

[rslifkin]

Originally Posted by boatpoker

We have 6 alarms on our boat.
It really ticks me off that they all sound the same. How hard is it to have a standard that requires different sounds for different types of alarms ?

That's a very good point. As I've added and re-built alarm systems on my boat I've been careful about that. I made sure that the engine alarms and bilge alarm use very different sounding alarm hardware, for example.

[barcoMeCasa]

Originally Posted by boatpoker

We have 6 alarms on our boat.
It really ticks me off that they all sound the same. How hard is it to have a standard that requires different sounds for different types of alarms ?

I use signalk for alarms which is set up to play an audio file, a rather nice lady tells you loudly "Signalk anchor alarm"


Actually makes a really big difference, really helps compared to PaNiC - where's that beep coming from!!! What is it!!!!

[barcoMeCasa]

Originally Posted by Mal Reynolds

Maybe Signal K is an answer, so maybe I need to go down that rabbit hole.

Doubt if there's anything else close to being able to do what signalk can do out there. Simple to get running & lots help at the forum if you are getting data from far & wide & strayed far from NMEA.

But more than alarms, graphing all the data coming in lets you see very subtle trends which would never get spotted looking at numbers & can alert you to problems ahead before they happen. for instance my LiFePo4 was dropping a tiny bit lower in voltage under heavy load than it was a week before which turned out to be a terminal nut torqued up a bit, problem solved. Would never have been spotted so early otherwise.