Getting your RV or trailer parked nice and level is key to getting a good night’s sleep. Traditional methods involve bubble levels and trial and error, but [MJCulross] wanted something better. Enter the Teensy RV Leveling Helper.
The device uses an accelerometer to detect the pitch and roll angles of the RV. It then displays these on a small screen, and performs calculations on how much the RV must be raised at each corner to bring it level. The RV’s width and wheelbase can be entered via a simple touchscreen interface to ensure the calculations are correct. There’s also a trailer mode which calculates three-point leveling figures for the wheels and the hitch, as opposed to the four-wheeled RV mode.
The result is that the correct leveling blocks can be selected first time when parking up the RV or trailer. It’s a lot less tedious than the usual method of parking, leveling, checking, and then leveling again.
We don’t see a lot of camper hacks around here, but we’ve noticed a new trend towards lightweight cycle campers in recent years. If you’ve found your own nifty hacks for your home on the open road, don’t hesitate to let us know!
Take my money! This is *highly* relevant to my interests…
I’ve created a PCB & waiting for the first prototypes to come back from Oshpark. If it works as intended, I’ll post a link so others can potentially order their own PCB copy to make building the unit rather.
Mark J Culross
KD5RXT
rather ==> easier
Nice as a hardware hack, but to just “solve the problem” writing a phone app sounds easy enough that there’s bound to be “an app for that” out there already.
But for Hackaday-hardware-hacking, this way is much more fun.
For phone-app developers out there: If there isn’t “an app for this” already out there, consider writing one. Bonus points if it uses multiple phones spaced around the RV for increased measurement accuracy and another phone that is in the user’s hands showing the results.
Another great option for this would be to level a workbench that you move around your garage. My garage is not very level and this would be perfect.
@David M: you could certainly use a modified version of this project as you describe. Since my application was targeted for trailer/RV use, I added constraints for minimum & maximum values on the “wheel base” and “axle width” parameters. You could simply remove these constraints (& probably rename them more appropriately), & use it for your workbench, table, cart, etc., as big or small as they may be. Thanks for your comment !!
Nice idea. It could also be done as phone app, all phones now have accelerometer, and everyone has a phone in a pocket…
I there have been android apps like this for like a decade.
The problem is that the counter you want to level is *inside* the trailer, and the leveling blocks you manipulate is *outside*… and campgrounds are known to often have pretty poor cell/network connectivity. You could potentially have a two phone solution where the “inside” phone is set on the counter and talks to the “outside” phone via Bluetooth to tell you what side to jack up/down… but nothing of this sort is on any of the app stores as far as I can tell.
Maybe text to speech could take the place of the other person calling out what to do, then it’s one phone and optionally a wireless speaker/earbuds if your speaker isn’t loud enough.
I don’t know what the precision is like, though. Seems like an oldschool way would be to make marks on the levels to show how many blocks you needed when it was originally a certain angle off. Then you can just use the same number again.
This is hackaday, is it not ?? Where’s the fun in loading &v running an app on a phone ?? One of my fellow RVers was absolutely miserable on a recent outing over not being able to quickly & easily level his RV, so this is as much for him (to make his RV life much easier) as it is for me (to allow me to be lazy & quick). I also really wanted to fully document this particular project such that others can readily build their own, possibly learn something, & maybe even customize it in ways that I could never imagine. Happy RVing !!
Running existing app is not fun at all, I agree. But writing an app can be as fun as building a hardware solution.
btw nice job!
Nice, but takes all the challenge out of leveling and I suspect not as accurate as my old Starrett 199 level (0.0005 inch/ft) – nice job however and will save someone a lot of work
Are you that guy that pulls out a slide rule and makes everyone wait 10 minutes while you calculate the trig by hand to work out that the rear left has to be raised 2″, then is surprised to find everyone else has wandered off to the beach and won’t help you?
Are you the guy who takes over and spends 10 minutes experimenting with all the wrong ways to do something so you can save the 30 seconds it would take to see what the manual says?
I am. And by the way, I can possibly damage it…
Oh, an expert I see!
This is neat. There are commercial products like this which work with electric jacks to auto level the RV. It would be cool to see this grow to have that functionality.
version 2.0, sometime down the road . . .
Could also use an fpv flight controller too but this is probably cheaper and a better stepping stone to a legit production level product.
Our Melles-Griot laser optics bench had a nifty thing… self levelling via simple uncovered air ports in the air suspension system. We carried it down the stairs leading out to the handicapped lot at the Geek Group and had a rep from Haas check it… the multi-thousand dollar level said it was fine (he also levelled our pool table).
Would a pair of spirit level bubbles on each corner not work as well? With the added benefit of real time feedback? I’m imagining they could be incorporated into the body work as a permanent feature, or perhaps retrofitted via a 3D printed assembly?
That’s the boring/traditional answer, but (a) four point levelling is still a bit tricky, and (b) often there’s no good way to mount the levels so they are visible in the way you want, resulting in a lot of squinting and running or looking back and forth. Again, the “traditional” way is to make it a two-person job, with one person watching the level (wherever it’s mounted) and yelling out instructions to the other person, who is at the crank/wheel blocks/whatever. It works, but it’s not fun — especially in the rain.
The promise of this device is that it gives you a total solution immediately: go out and put x” of blocks on this wheel and x” of blocks on that wheel and you go out and do that and you’re done. No staring at a level and no yelling or running back and forth.
Sure, no one *needs* this. You can level a trailer just by leaving a door ajar and moving your leveling blocks around until the door doesn’t swing open or closed by itself. But the device is just a little more *fun*.
@wibble: yes, you are entirely correct that a pair of bubbles would work. In fact, we have one bubble level (it is shaped like the top of a sphere, so it gives indications of both “front-to-back” level & “left-to-right” level, all at once in a single glance) on the kitchen counter, and another up front between the cup holders. The are *excellent* as a go/no-go indicator (you’re either satisfactorily level or you’re not). Hence, when the bubbles said that we were not level, we were left with having to make our best guess as to how many blocks were needed (that’s the primary limitation that I hoped that my project could address). Since our RV does not have leveling jacks, we have to setup the “best guess” number of blocks (including a slight ramp made out of the same blocks to allow easy “drive up”) & literally drive our RV up onto the stack(s) of blocks, check the bubbles again, drive down off the blocks if the initial guess was not good enough, (re)set the blocks with the newly refined best guess, drive back up on the blocks again, check the bubbles again, etc. etc. etc. I am most pleased to have implemented the “setup the exact number of blocks (inches) on each wheel as indicated, drive up, check again to confirm (within one inch is satisfactory for the refrigerator & for sleeping comfort), & you’re usually done in a single pass !!” I’ll be the first to admit that I have definitely not “invented” anything here, I’ve simply taken advantage of the info available from the sensor, made appropriate calculations, & displayed the results in a simple & effective way to (hopefully) make the job of leveling the RV much quicker. I have not yet delivered the second copy to my fellow (miserable) RV camper, but I hope that his first thought, when he finally gets to use this project for the first time, will be “how did I ever accomplish this task without this tool ?!?!?”. Thanks for your comment !!
I have very fond memories from being like 6 years old and of sitting in the trailer looking at the level shouting at the top of my lungs as dad pulls it onto the leveling blocks from the truck.
That said, this device is actually a great solution now that we’re older and time spent leveling the trailer could be better served drinking bourbon. I guess as we age our priorities shift and I’m not sad for either of them.
I have a technical question — what’s with the two-transistor circuit attached to the PowerBoost’s LBO pin? Is that just to level shift the 5V “low battery” LBO signal to 3.3V in order to connect it to a 3.3V input pin on the Teensy? All you’d really need for that is a diode + configuring the teensy input as a pull-up. I find RTL logic unusual in a modern design — plus the fact that handling an inverted software is so easily done in software that I don’t fully understand why you’d need the second stage RTL inverter. Makes me think I must be missing something…
Yes, as you guessed, that circuit is a level conversion (BTW, non-inverting) of the (not really 5V “TTL”) LBO signal to a very precise ON/OFF 3.3VDC level (specifically for the Teensy 4.0, which is not 5V tolerant). I tried the diode method, but two things led me to the specific transistor circuit in use: #1 on the Adafruit PowerBoost 1000C, this LBO signal has a resistor which pulls that signal up to the LiPo battery voltage. With this configuration, the LBO output could potentially be as high a 4.2VDC when the battery is fully charged and/or charging. Using one diode drop (nominally 0.7VDC) would result in a potentially 3.5VDC level applied to the Teensy input pin, which, for my personal comfort level (I’m more of a software guy, not so much a hardware guy, so I am very conservative when it comes to any hardware), was not enough voltage drop to ensure that I didn’t blow the Teensy digital input, & #2 with the diode in series, the transition from “battery good” to “low battery” sensed by the Teensy was very fuzzy, where I wanted a definitive “it’s time to charge the battery” indication on the display, without any flickering back & forth between “BATT OK” & “LOW BATT”. There are multiple alternatives & approaches which might accomplish this same signal level conversion. For example, one I chose not to pursue: I could have removed the pull-up resistor connected to the battery on the LBO signal & instead, added a pull-up to the Teensy’s 3.3VDC power output instead (or define the input to make use of the internal pull-up as you suggest), but I chose to use all of the components as they came, off-the-shelf, unmodified. That was my over-simplified design & implementation choice, and I remain happy with any trade-offs that resulted. Thanks for your well stated & well explained question/comment !!
A simply way that I use is to go to the kitchen sink and run a few ounces of water in the sink and see where it flows to. If it flow to a corner you need to raise that corner or lower the oppisite corner. If it flows to the drain then your as level as you need to be. Raise or lower and then check the water flow again.
@SDW: yours is a very creative, simple, & effective approach. I like it most for the fact that anyone can make use of it without buying/installing anything over & above what you already have !! However, see my comment above about “go/no-go” indication vs “inches” indication. Still, I definitely like your approach !!
This appears to be a perfectly reasonable facsimile for the LevelMate
The HW use BLE to communicate with the phone app to avoid all of the “offline” challenges there.
https://levelmate.com/