Tire Pressure

We have added an Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) to Molly. This is partly for safety, partly for convenience and mainly for fun. We wanted a tire pressure monitoring system that could be connected to our computer, this way we can not only see the current tire pressure, but we can also monitor the tire pressure over an extended time period.

Sometimes when we go off-road, and when we do we air-down the tires, and it would be nice to have multiple air pressure configurations, so the system can continue to correctly monitoring the tire pressure, even when in these air-downed configurations.

We have seen too many youtube videos where “Overlanders” drove on bad roads not knowing that one of their tires was in trouble, resulting in a completely shredded tire and in one case wheel damage. The hope is not to experience these type of serious issues, as the tire pressure system will alert us.

The system we settled on was the Gateway Lite from Pressure Pro, also known as the LINK LT. This is a commercial grade product intended for the trucking industry, and acts as a gateway to send tire pressures to fleet management systems. As such, it does not have any display unit. This was perfect for us, as we didn’t really want another thing to clutter up the cab. When we want, we can display the tire pressures and temperatures on our Garmin Overlander, our phones or the laptop.

The computer will constantly monitor the pressure and temperature signals from the TPMS, and immediately raise the alarm should it detect a leak and other tire pressure or temperature related problem. Slow leaks is the most likely thing to go wrong, and we have had a number of slow leaks from nails and sharp rocks in the past (on our Land Rover). The tire pressure readings from the sensor will also be easier to make sure the tires are evenly inflated, including when we air-down and air back up.

The Sensors

The tire pressure sensors screw directly onto the valve stem, reporting both tire pressure and temperature. The sensors are sealed and submersible and the internal battery lasts about 5 years.

Pressure

Operating Range: 8 to 215 PSI

Accuracy: ±2-3 PSI (13kPa)

Resolution 1 PSI (6kPa)

Temperature

Operating range: -20°C to 70°C

Resolution: 1.4°C

Gateway Lite

The Gateway Lite is mounted in the electrical cabinet with a connection to an external antenna mounted under Molly. The Gateway Lite is connected to 12 volts for power and to the house computer via an RS232 interface. The RS232 signal levels are converted to a more computer friendly USB connection with a standard FDTI based cable.

The Pressure Pro communication protocol is proprietary, but they were kind enough to share the protocol details with us. This allows us to locally read the status and alert messages for pressure and temperature, log them and ultimately display them.

Writing the Software

The only complication of the system we choose is that we have to write some software to monitor the system and raise the alarm. Turned out this software is actually quite simple.

The communications protocol from the Gateway Lite is relatively simple, it only took a few hours to configure node-red to talk its language. Because it is a proprietary protocol, I will not go into the details of the actual protocol, but it is simple and easy to decode. I can however explain the structure of the software.

Incoming messages are checked for integrity by making sure the message checksum is valid. We configured the gateway to broadcast the tire pressure status messages every minute, and on receipt, these are decoded and the key parameters like current tire pressure, tire temperature and target tire pressure are extracted. Alerts indicating issues with tire pressure are also broadcast every minute, and decoded to determine if an alert is active.

We included a communication watchdog to make sure at least 1 valid message is received every 90 seconds, and if not, then an alert is also triggered indicating the system is malfunctioning.

Each sensor reports new readings every 4 to 5 minutes. But if there is a fault condition, like low pressure or high temperature, then they alert immediately. And if a fault condition is detected, then this is alerted immediately to the “Buzzer”. The buzzer is our alarm. Otherwise the monitoring software just quietly records metrics every minute for long term trending.

Testing on the “bench”! Setup was relatively easy.
Installing the Equipment

As mentioned, the Gateway Lite is installed into our electrical cabinet, providing easy access to power and the communication connection to the computer. This is a better location than under Molly, where there is more dust and rocks.

The antenna is located under Molly and is cabled back to the Gateway Lite. The sensors are installed onto the 4 tires and also the spare tire. The Gateway Lite can report the radio signal strength from each sensor, this allowed us to confirm that the antenna was located in a good position was getting a good signal.

The sensor themselves are merely screwed onto the valve stem of the tire.

The Head Unit

Our Garmin Overlander is the primary method we have to check the tire pressures and temperatures. We have a custom node-red dashboard with nice big font which is easy to read while driving. The spare is not displayed, but is monitored and will alert if there is an issue.

Garmin Overlander showing our Tire Pressures and Temperatures. If we are driving and want to check the pressures, then using the Garmin Overland is the easiest way. But we do not typically drive with this display on.
The sensors just fit on our wheels. They are relatively well protected from being knocked off.
The antenna is mounted under the house. It is relatively high up, and hopefully will not get damaged by flying rocks. If it does, we will relocate it.
The Buzzer

As there is no tire pressure display in our front cab, so we need a different way to alert us of tire related issues. Actually we need a way to alert us to any type of issue. And this is where the “buzzer” comes into play. Should the TPMS detect an issue, or should the buzzer lose communications with the TPMS, then our buzzer will alert us to the problem. On a TPMS fault, it will re-alert every 60 seconds until we either fix the issue or silence it via the control panel. The buzzer is located in the front cab, behind the dash, and sounds a lot like a smoke alarm. It is loud, in fact it is loud enough to wake us up in the middle of the night.

It is quite important that this little buzzer thing works. The controller for the buzzer has a heartbeat or watchdog timer set to 10 minutes, if the last message received from the TPMS software is more than 10 minutes old, then something has clearly gone wrong with either the wifi communications or the TPMS gateway. Either way, this triggers the watchdog and causes the buzzer to go off for a quarter of a second, repeating every 10 minutes until a message is received.

There are two future upgrades anticipated. First is to add a start-up beep, so when the ignition is turned on, the buzzer will chirp to indicating it is working. The second is to hook the TPMS gateway into the Fuso can-bus so the low pressure indicator lights on the dashboard. But these are for another day.

The buzzer to alert us to an issue with the tires.

The buzzer project was started for the TPMS, but over time we extended the use of the buzzer to be a part of a larger alerting system. More details can be found on our alerting post.

We can monitor Tire Pressure and Temperature. from left to rig, Drivers Front, Passengers Front, Drivers Rear, Passengers Front and Spare. Looks like the spare needs to be inflated.
The Pressure Pro TPMS allows us to also monitor the quality of the radio signal from the sensors on the tires. The signal can be between 0 and 100, and anything above the noise level (3 in this case) is good.