2022 Jayco North Point 382FLRB

The monitoring system

The factory controls are never going anywhere — they’re the fallback. Everything we’ve added sits on top of them, read-only where it matters and supervised where it counts.

A Raspberry Pi 5 rides in a cabinet behind the Starlink. It taps the trailer’s RV-C bus and talks Bluetooth to the BMPRO node, and from there it watches — and, where it’s safe to, controls:

• Propane — three tank-top sensors, level and temperature
• Water — fresh, grey, and black tank levels
• Power — both lithium batteries, state of charge and voltage, cell by cell
• Tires — pressure and temperature at all four corners
• Climate — cabin and fridge temperatures, both A/C zones
• Lights — interior and accent lighting, switched right from the dashboard
• Slides — all five, extended and retracted on-site, always under a watchful eye
• Awnings — both electric awnings, always run by hand (never on a timer or automation)
• Leveling — live status of the six-point auto-leveler: settled and level, actively leveling, jacks moving, or an excessive-slope warning — and it flips to in transit once the rig is rolling down the road
• Starlink — throughput, latency, obstruction, data used this month, even a 3D sky-map of the dish’s view
• Weather — live conditions and the forecast wherever the rig is parked
• Generator — run state and auto-gen-start status
• Position — GPS location, speed, and elevation, logged into a trip history of speed-colored routes and climb profiles
• Fuel — the truck’s diesel level and a live range-to-empty, with a heads-up — and the cheapest diesel stops on the road ahead — before it ever runs low
• Alerts — a push notification the moment something needs attention: a freeze warning, a tire losing air, shore power lost, or the trailer dropping offline
• System health — each Pi keeps an eye on its own temperature, storage, and links, so nothing quietly fails in a cabinet

A little more under the hood

That cabinet Pi isn’t alone anymore. A second Raspberry Pi 5 rides down in the battery compartment, dedicated to the two lithium batteries — they only speak Bluetooth, and they speak it best up close, so the little battery node reads them right where they live and hands the numbers up to the main Pi. The main Pi boots off a fast solid-state drive (the memory card is kept as a spare), and it reaches the trailer’s network through an externally mounted Wi-Fi antenna so the link stays rock-solid even with the Pi tucked inside a metal-edged cabinet.

And the charge level you see is the true one. A Victron SmartShunt wired into the main battery bank counts every amp flowing in and out, so the state of charge is coulomb-counted — measured, not guessed from voltage — right down to how many hours are left at the current draw.

And to keep those batteries fed on a long haul, a DC-DC charger — a Victron Orion-TR — now sits between the truck and the trailer. While we’re rolling it draws off the truck’s charging line and pushes a steady sixteen-odd amps into the lithium bank, so we can pull into camp with more in the batteries than we left with — no shore power required.

Propane is its own little challenge — the bottles sit far enough from the cabinet that the Bluetooth readings were spotty. So two small ESP32 Bluetooth relays now sit near the tanks and forward the sensor signals along, one covering the forward pair and one the third bottle. The result: every tank comes through strong and steady, no matter where the Pi is.

All of it streams home to a server for long-term history, and the trips you’ll find here are rendered straight from that GPS log.

2022 Jayco North Point 382FLRB

A front-living fifth wheel with five slides, six-point hydraulic auto-leveling, two electric awnings, and an onboard generator with auto-gen-start for dry camping. Stock, it runs on Jayco’s JayCommand / BMPRO system with a wall tablet.

We pull it through the Rockies and out across the West, which means it spends its life swinging between full-hookup parks, state-park campgrounds, and the occasional night of boondocking on generator power.

The basics

The truck

None of this moves an inch without something to pull it — and ours is a black 2025 GMC Sierra 3500 Denali Ultimate. It’s the muscle behind every mile, dragging the whole rig up and over the Rockies without complaint. The trailer gets all the glory; the truck does all the work. (As the family will tell you, so does the driver. 😄)

The truck talks to the dashboard now, too. A small Vgate iCar Pro plugs into its OBD-II port and reads the diesel level and odometer, so the system can dead-reckon a live range as we drive — and warn us, with the cheapest diesel ahead, well before the tank gets low.

Upgrades & repairs

We treat the first trip of every season as a shakedown run — something always turns up, and we’d rather find it close to home than six hundred miles out. Here’s the running log of what we’ve fixed.

• Hot water heater — rewired (May 2026). No hot water on the first trip out. The heater itself was fine; the culprit was an inline fuse the installer had buried out of reach, and it had blown. Cut it out and ran a clean rewire with a new, accessible inline fuse holder. Hot water back in about ten minutes. — Boyd Lake Getaway
• Hot water heater — replaced (2025). The original unit didn’t survive the winter after a mobile tech’s winterizing job skipped it. Swapped in for a new heater.