Open Source Exploration

What the heck does this have to do with sailing?

At the moment I have absolutely no idea... (lol)

Prior to the summer of 2020 I’d progressively upgraded Windstar's electronics as follows:  

• Raymarine SEATALKng backbone 
• Raymarine Ev-100 evolution autopilot comprising:

• Ev-1 compass sensor 
• Acu-100 controller 
• Wheel drive 
• P70 control head
• Raymarine i70 multi instrument display
• Garmin gps antenna 
• Maretron speed/depth sensor
• ICOM M506 AIS VHF 
• VYacht wifi gateway (this feeds network data nia wifi or Ethernet, , converted to nmea0183 format from nmea2000)
• Actisense NGT-1 USB gateway.  This feeds nmea2000 data via a serial (USB) connection to any USB device.
• 2 iPads running iSailor, fed by the vYacht gateway. (The iPad cannot accept USB data and iSailor was not able to accept nmea2000 data.)

All of the hardware is NMEA2000 (SeatalkNG) compliant, and it is documented in other pages on this blog.  (look at posts under "Electrical and Electronics")   Wanting to better understand and exploit the network and technology, and extremely curious about the open source world, I decided to take the plunge.  

The prototype assembly and installation of the various parts is discussed here.

Follow the links below to read more about the various components:

• Raspberry Pi - a powerful palm sized computer utilizing a Linux OS, that runs on 3.2A max of of 5.2vdc USB power.
• OpenPlotter - a complete suite of sailing applications, including openCPN, that runs on a Raspberry Pi 
• openCPN - an full-featured open source chartplotter, with a range of plug-ins.
• oSENC charts - open(ish) source charts for openCPN.

Also worth reading:

• SignalK - An open source protocol for the exchange of marine data.
• An excellent Panbo article discussing some applications and the potential of a SignalK server (included in OpenPlotter) can be found here. 

Below are some screenshots of OpenPlotter to provide some understanding of its components.   New functionality is underdevelopment for it and openCPN.

Below is a signalK Dashboard.   This is a custom view featuring 14 of the 45 datapoints on my NMEA2000 network.   Very cool, you can troubleshoot and monitor any aspect of the boat's systems.  As a simple example, I used this to quickly assess electronic compass deviation and create a deviation table.   

I used this setup for my route planning and navigation on a recent 8 day cruise between Whitby and the Thousand Islands in lake Ontario.  It was reliable and worked well.  (including wifi, web browser, email...)  

More to learn, more to follow.