LandYacht
Open-source van automation

Built for people
who spent their
life savings on
a van they
now live in.

↳ The grey tank is full, by the way.

A monitoring system that answers the questions that actually matter when a parking lot is your neighbourhood — no subscription, no cloud, no yacht prices.

01 — What it is

Real data.
No cloud.
No drama.

LandYacht is a modular automation system for converted vehicles — vans, Sprinters, skoolies, buses. Built around a Raspberry Pi and a network of cheap wireless sensor nodes, it answers the questions that actually matter when a parking lot is your neighborhood: how much battery do you have, is the water running out, and is this thing level enough that your coffee stays in the cup.

It runs entirely on hardware that costs less than a campsite with a shower. It requires neither a monthly subscription nor the spiritual surrender of connecting another thing to someone else's cloud. It does not care what kind of battery, solar charger, or life philosophy you arrived with.

For the growing army of van and bus dwellers who are nerdy enough to want real data but too broke and too stubborn to pay yacht prices for it.

<$150
Full system, parts only
8
Independent nodes
0
Cloud dependencies
$0
Monthly fees, ever
02 — Coverage

Every
thing
that
matters.

Eight independent nodes cover every corner of the van. Each publishes to its own MQTT topic. Each is fused, enclosed, and reachable over WiFi for firmware updates. Swap one out — the rest don't notice.

Fuel level
Fresh water tank
Grey water tank
Interior temp — zone A
Interior temp — zone B
Exterior temperature
Battery compartment temp
Battery SOC — cell level
Vehicle leveling
Door servo control
Zone lighting

Every sensor node runs on the same board — one spare part covers the whole system.

03 — Dashboards

Three
surfaces.
One truth.

The same sensor data appears wherever you need it. Each display runs independently — if one goes down, the rest keep running.

Physical
The cab display

A $10 touchscreen mounted in the dash. Always on. Five subscreens: overview, temperatures, tanks, leveling, door control. Plain-English bubble level. Works with no Pi, no internet, no phone.

Mobile
The phone dashboard

Served by the Pi. Live data via WebSocket. Installable as a home screen app — no app store. Accessible from anywhere via encrypted VPN. Same URL, every campsite.

Historical
Grafana trends

Every sensor, every reading, as far back as the SD card holds. Temperature over two weeks. Water patterns. Battery cycles. Understanding the van as a system over time.

04 — Under the hood

Proven
open source.
On a Pi.

LandYacht doesn't reinvent anything. It assembles proven open-source tools into a van-specific system. Every service runs locally. None of it talks to a cloud unless you tell it to.

Mosquitto
MQTT broker — the central nervous system. Every node publishes here, every dashboard subscribes.
Node-RED
Browser dashboard, automation engine, and WebSocket bridge. Three roles, one service. Tank alerts are three draggable blocks.
InfluxDB + Telegraf
Every sensor reading written to a time-series database. Telegraf bridges MQTT to InfluxDB in 20 lines of config.
Grafana
Trend charts and historical dashboards, accessible from anywhere via Tailscale.
Tailscale
Free VPN. Pi joins once, phone joins once. Same URL works at every campsite, no port forwarding, no router fiddling.
~$150
Full system · parts only · no subscription
Victron Cerbo GX
$475–$900
Industry standard. Excellent hardware. Proprietary ecosystem, display sold separately.
Simarine Pico
$350–$600
Beautiful hardware. Closed protocol — no MQTT, no actuation, no external data output.
05 — Principles

The
decisions
that don't
move.

These are load-bearing. They define what LandYacht is and what it will never become.

One board per sensor

Any node can fail, be replaced, or be skipped without touching anything else. Consolidation feels efficient until it breaks.

MQTT is the contract

Change the hardware, keep the topic. Change the dashboard, keep the topic. The topic structure is the only interface that matters.

Standalone first

Every node is useful on its own. The fuel gauge works without the Pi. The cab display works without the web dashboard.

Plain English in the UI

"VEHICLE LEVEL" not "pitch/roll". "SEALED" not "servo state: 0". The driver is not a developer.

No proprietary lock-in

Every component can be sourced independently. Every service can be replaced. The system outlives any single supplier.

Open source, protected brand

The code is free forever under GPL v3. The name LandYacht is trademarked. Both things are true and compatible.

LandYacht

Built by someone who
genuinely needed it.

The code is on GitHub. The documentation is plain language. The hardware list is a $20 order. Start with one node, add the rest when you're ready.