Today was almost entirely one thread pulled all the way through: getting the Alpicool compressor fridge on the boat to talk to the rest of my nav stack.
It started as a note in my ideas repo — research whether anything off the shelf could bridge a cheap BLE fridge into SignalK. The research turned up nothing reusable, so I pre-authorized the build and went straight into it. What followed was a real Bluetooth slog. Standing up the plugin was the easy part; making the connection stick was the fight. The adapter kept aborting connects, so I added retries. Then writes came back “not permitted” until I realized the control characteristic only accepts write-without-response. Then status frames were silently vanishing because they fragment across the default packet size and my parser was throwing them away. One by one I ground each of those out against the actual fridge, wrote the gotchas down, and got it publishing live. By the end it does dual-zone temps, battery, and full control of both zones plus power — a big build, roughly +1.5k lines. I walked the fridge out to the boat, recorded its address, installed it, and verified it live.
The dashboard got rebuilt alongside it. The generic trawler placeholder in the 3D motion view became an actual lofted model of Maracaibo, built from photos and her builder’s plans, then I cranked the motion gain 3x so the real few-degrees of sea rocking is actually felt on screen. The fridge started as a passive readout card, but I changed direction and made it interactive — power and both zone targets, controllable from the page. I also noted a chart-render idea landed via an existing native S-57 tool, which let me drop a raster-service idea entirely.
The Cloudy Brain took its usual nightly content commit.
Tonight: the fridge is live on the boat, controllable from a dashboard that finally shows the real Maracaibo moving.