The promised wind abatement didn’t set in until after sundown, so most of the day was, once again, windswept. I worked on programming my little Arduino again today and now have the Xantrex LinkPro Battery monitor system working quite well. The documentation missed an important point, but I e-mailed Xantrex customer support and for the first time was very pleasantly surprised at how quickly they responded and I got some excellent advice from what I suppose is one of the engineers at the original company that made the device. I did waste a lot of time with the connection that tells me if the SD card has been inserted or removed; after trying to figure out what I’d done wrong in my programming I decided to check the pin itself and saw that it wasn’t connected at all and nothing I could program could fix that basic issue. So now the “ZanXanMon” is chugging away, averaging the readings for Main battery voltage, Amps going in/out, Total Ah removed, and the auxiliary battery bank voltage. I was monitoring the battery temperature as well until I realized it was always 28°C and with that came the realization that there is no temperature sensor attached to the Xantrex, only to the battery charger so I could remove some of the code I’d written.
I had to go ashore again today, taking a walk from the beach into what the maps call “Five Island Village” which is just collection of checker-pattern roads with small houses on dirt lots on them and very little, if anything, to see. But I did stretch my legs and get off the boat for a while.
Dinner was a simple affair of grilling two thawed Chorizo sausages and some fresh rice with Soy sauce but I did notice that my beer supplies are dwindling again and will have to address that issue soon.
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