At the end of 2024, after nearly four decades in corporate IT, the last ten as a Platform Engineering lead, I walked away from the career I’d built to do something completely different. The plan was simple: build a campervan and travel.
What I didn’t expect was to start a company.
During the build I was genuinely shocked by how little the world of recreational vehicle control had advanced. We live in a connected era, where every device imaginable can be monitored, automated, and controlled from a phone. Yet step inside most RVs and marine vessels and every system is an island, the heating, the power, the lights, the security, each with its own app, its own panel, its own remote, and none of them talking to each other. A drawer full of remotes and a phone full of apps, and the job of holding it all together falls to you.
I couldn’t find a single solution on the market that felt like it belonged to the modern world. So the mission changed.
"The plan was to build a campervan and travel. What I didn't expect was to start a company."
Built on freely available hardware and Home Assistant, which is open source, nothing bespoke or single-sourced. The Nomad appliance is fully managed by us so it just works; if you’d rather hold the keys, deployment types that give you full Home Assistant admin are available.
Not just one screen for everything, a system that follows your life and quietly takes care of things, so you can get on with the journey.
Supporting DIY builders through articles, guides and an open library of knowledge.
What Sensa is today
With a career built on platform engineering, the answer was always going to be open technology, freely available hardware and open source software, with nothing bespoke or single-sourced tying you to one supplier.
Sensa is the result of that thinking applied to recreational vehicles. Our platform is built on Home Assistant and freely available, off-the-shelf hardware, giving you a genuinely intelligent, connected control system without the proprietary strings attached.
Sensa Nomad is our first product, a complete control system for RVs, campervans and motorhomes. It brings power, climate, tanks, lighting and safety together into one calm, connected interface and then goes further, following your day and looking after the things you’d otherwise have to remember yourself.
Sensa Helm follows for the marine world, the same philosophy built for life on the water.
And for those who want to build their own, we’re growing a library of articles, guides and community support for the self-build journey.