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Topic starter
2022-08-05 5:48 pm
I'm a former programmer, C#, Angular mostly, but lots of other experience. I'm now retired and have bought a boat currently in Hawaii. I am upgrading lots of equipment on the boat, but also upgrading the instrumentation on the boat. I want to connect sensors like temperature of refrigerators, tank level, engine stats, battery usage, etc, etc, into my existing NMEA 2000 and NMEA 0183 network and have a complete instrumentation display on a Raymarine plotter and any device that can connect to the wireless network. It's ambitious, but I've got some time. To that end, I am learning various topics like 1-Wire, ESP32, MQTT, Raspberry PI, ESP-Now, Visual Studio Code with PlatformIO, Node-Red, Signal K, OpenPlotter (including Dashboards in it), and the list goes on an on. When it has reached some level of utility, I will be heading across the Pacific on a life long adventure dream with spouse.
Duce robot reacted
2022-08-05 7:25 pm
What kind of sailboat, and are you on the Victron network?
First computer 1959. Retired from my own computer company 2004.
Hardware - Expert in 1401, and 360, fairly knowledge in PC plus numerous MPU's and MCU's
Major Languages - Machine language, 360 Macro Assembler, Intel Assembler, PL/I and PL1, Pascal, Basic, C plus numerous job control and scripting languages.
Sure you can learn to be a programmer, it will take the same amount of time for me to learn to be a Doctor.
2022-08-05 8:00 pm
I envy your project. Please ask questions as needed and share progress. I couldn't drag my wife from land, but I'd like to do many of the same type projects... on a budget.
For instance... building an anemometer and wind vane to run into a wireless network and save a $grand.
3 lines of code = InqPortal = Complete IoT, App, Web Server w/ GUI Admin Client, WiFi Manager, Drag & Drop File Manager, OTA, Performance Metrics, Web Socket Comms, Easy App API, All running on ESP8266...
Even usable on ESP-01S - Quickest Start Guide
Topic starter
2022-08-05 8:11 pm
The boat is an Irwin 54, about 62 feet.
I do have a couple of Victron devices. An inverter, Color display and 2 power shunts. The data they are displaying is available but it's low on my list to integrate it into the rest of the instrumentation and may not be that easy because of proprietary undocumented Victron busses. And the inverter is only a backup for the much larger one I just installed. (I now have 2350 watts of solar panels to run all this stuff).
There is no boat wireless network at present. Older instruments still supply SeaTalk which is converted to NMEA 0183. Some instruments use NMEA 0183. The chart plotter is Raymarine, and that is the sole NMEA 2000 capable device. I intend to bridge all relevant data to NMEA 2000 because much of it can be displayed on the chart plotter screens and the Raspberry Pi can display the rest. I just bought an Actisense W2K-1 which will put all NMEA 2000 data on a wireless network so things like phones and tablets can use the data. I don't know how to put it all together just yet, but there are tons of videos out there which should get me there. Signal K and Node-Red appear to be two components that will be useful. And various OpenPlotter dashboards like Kip and SailGuage will allow me to display data. Navigation will be on both Raspberry PI and Raymarine (integrated with overlays like AIS). I also have purchased an Iridium GO which will allow me to get weather data from satellite and just a couple of days ago got my ham license so I can operate the on-board SSB with a Pactor modem as a back up.
Whew!!! DroneBotWorkshop sure got me started by introducing software and hardware I had never heard of. I'll see how far I get before setting out.
This post was modified 2 years ago 2 times by Wray
2022-08-05 8:35 pm
@wrayx1 Sounds like you will have something to keep you busy for a while. All the best.
First computer 1959. Retired from my own computer company 2004.
Hardware - Expert in 1401, and 360, fairly knowledge in PC plus numerous MPU's and MCU's
Major Languages - Machine language, 360 Macro Assembler, Intel Assembler, PL/I and PL1, Pascal, Basic, C plus numerous job control and scripting languages.
Sure you can learn to be a programmer, it will take the same amount of time for me to learn to be a Doctor.