31–40 of 72 posts
Is the rpi rated for environments with high humidity? Shouldn't it be in a water resistant enclosure?
They’re surprisingly resilient actually. I had one on my last boat (though in a space that was primarily air conditioned all the time. Had another on my balcony running a Marine Traffic AIS station for 6 years that was ‘weatherproofed’ with an unsealed ziploc bag. No issues.
My engineering sense says RPi isn’t a good choice here, there’s a lot of potential failures that could happen, from a corrupted sd card, to overheating, harsh environment, among others, an industrial mini PC with proper protection and resources as well would be far better.
> My engineering sense says RPi isn’t a good choice here, there’s a lot of potential failures that could happen Amen to that. I blame the YouTube influencers posting all the RPi content that would make you believe you can run the world on RPi. Some of the shit they post is truly dumb ... Ceph clusters on RPi ? Rather you than me !!! I once experimented with Pi's just for a fun unimportant home-server project. I got s…
That was just a decent consumer-grade SD card.
I’m not sure your experience happens to most people, at least not recently.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And for anyone wondering about an opportunity to shake up the market just estimate TAM and you'll see quickly why boat stuff is priced at such a premium. The number of people using things like Open plotter is even smaller, but still greatly appreciated by all!
I'm confused why does this mean no one can Carplay-ify the plotter/charting world for boats?
I have always wondered why, in the world of millionaires and billionaires and yachts, why plotters like these have such ancient ugly 80s graphics. There are literally decades of UI enhancements, both functional and cosmetic, that could modernize these things. Im talking about the elite of the elite who will spare no expense at bespoke designed watches, monogram clothes, cars, etc. So it always just boggles my mind wh…
We would have something purpose made from raymarine/garmin/whoever hard-mounted to the steering station networked into the various sensors onboard. There would be at least one redundant display elsewhere (out of the weather in the case of boats steered from deck). We would never go for something on a raspi. Some boats will have the sensor canbus hooked into a computer to use additional software. The purpose made displays are all sleek touchscreen systems that look more like a Tesla interface than this raspi thing.
As far as UI and graphics: They are modeled on what actual paper charts look like (which is standardized, and what mariners are trained to use). These are systems designed as a safety tool first, and iterating through the latest design fads every 2-3 years to make things pretty is unsafe. I want my chart-plotters and tools to be near universal in symbology and interface, and that is what they have done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And for anyone wondering about an opportunity to shake up the market just estimate TAM and you'll see quickly why boat stuff is priced at such a premium. The number of people using things like Open plotter is even smaller, but still greatly appreciated by all!
I'm confused why does this mean no one can Carplay-ify the plotter/charting world for boats?
Another issue is that there are very few makers or the technology.
I think it's a great area for development because it is immature and in the middle of technical upheaval that nobody really knows what how great a plotter could be.
HN crowd maybe doesn't appreciate it, but the marine sensor networking world, route plotting, and related tasks are an atrocious cesspool of overpriced, weirdly incompatible proprietary solutions. Regular people save literally tens of thousands of dollars per install by going open source in this space, and end up with superior toolkits.
In the US Commercial Tug & Barge market, Rose Point Navigation (out of Redmond, WA) has a near 100% saturation of the navigation software market. Why does nobody disrupt them? The overlap between experts in software and experts in vessel navigation is pretty low. Take a look at the technical specifications of their platform here and see if you can crack that out in a weekend: https://www.rosepoint.com/rose-point-ecs/…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I said in the other comment, there are already industrial PCs equipped with GPIO, and some models even include an integrated screen SBCs are good in conditions where reliability is not the primary concern - scenarios where frequent restarts are needed, change sd card, room temperature etc.), but in a boat? I don’t know anything about marine conditions but having a malfunctioning in SD cards and overheating is not…
I agree that a proper ruggedized industrial PC would fit better (and cost only a few hundyed more). If their software could work on it, or could be adapted / ported, that would be a great choice. But I suspect that what they have now is mostly married to Pi.
I have always wondered why, in the world of millionaires and billionaires and yachts, why plotters like these have such ancient ugly 80s graphics. There are literally decades of UI enhancements, both functional and cosmetic, that could modernize these things. Im talking about the elite of the elite who will spare no expense at bespoke designed watches, monogram clothes, cars, etc. So it always just boggles my mind wh…
Having been a yacht captain turned programmer: We would have something purpose made from raymarine/garmin/whoever hard-mounted to the steering station networked into the various sensors onboard. There would be at least one redundant display elsewhere (out of the weather in the case of boats steered from deck). We would never go for something on a raspi. Some boats will have the sensor canbus hooked into a computer to…
2. Even the big fancy screens in fancy yachts have god awful UI.
3. I am not talking about meaningless fad designs. Google Maps decades ago made road maps intuitive and beautiful at the same time.
By comparison, the vast majority of those chart plotters look like ancient Windows95 graphics. It's disingenuous to suggest that's as good as it can get. Google could have easily just scanned a bunch of awful old school highway maps and called it a day if that was true.
Signal K is an open source server / data format for marine electronics, often paired with OpenPlotter for building custom nav and monitoring systems with web standards (JSON, Websockets and HTTP). http://signalk.org/ Has an excellent community of developers and hardware components.
Signal K is an open source server / data format for marine electronics, often paired with OpenPlotter for building custom nav and monitoring systems with web standards (JSON, Websockets and HTTP). http://signalk.org/ Has an excellent community of developers and hardware components.
As a "sailor in tech", "web standards" do not belong anywhere near an ocean going vessel.