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OpenPlotter

openmarine.net

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Re: OpenPlotter

#61

Post by klaustopher »

brk wrote: post #30
Solvency wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, think 1M+ speed and luxury boats, etc.

Then you'll see MFDs from Garmin, Raymarine, etc. I had Raymarine Axiom's on my last boat and they were pretty modern. You could display charts, radar, sonor, engine data, all mixed and matched on various layouts. I could even watch Netflix at the helm if I wanted.

Personally, looking at the modern B&G devices[1], I find their UI pretty slick. Also super nice to get all needed information by just glancing at the display

[1]: https://www.bandg.com/zeus-s/

Re: OpenPlotter

#62

Post by sails »

pnut wrote: post #3

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.

People get pretty far with tablet apps these days (literally), and there is a good market for the development of the apps. Hardware integration is always the challenge.

See 59-north for examples of offshore sailing schools who seem to have found a good mix of modern and reliable

https://www.sailmagazine.com/cruising/navigating-by-tablet

The only thing I don’t like about a tablet is that it will ruin your night vision. Integrated marine electronics usually cater to that pretty well.

Re: OpenPlotter

#63

Post by mschuster91 »

AYBABTME wrote: post #56
nomand wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty skeptical of propitiatory protocols too. And a lot of pro marine stuff is starting to go wireless which is scary to think about.

It's all Bluetooth low energy afaict, they're not exactly in the field of inventing new RF comms.

BLE? I'd stay the hell away from that. It's bad enough dealing with it in consumer context, but in something safety critical?!

Re: OpenPlotter

#64

Post by p_l »

nine_k wrote: post #8
tamimio wrote: post #4

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.

They are heavily invested into using GPIO: https://openplotter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting_started... I wonder if industrial-strength RPi clones / variants exist. The demand is certainly there.

There are multiple sources of industrial-strength RPi-based systems for different environments. Including railway-certified devices, industrial controls, etc.

Often coupled with RPi "hat" interface used to attach isolated industrial I/O (24V/analog/4-20mA, etc) or other interfaces.

Re: OpenPlotter

#65

Post by keraf »

tamimio wrote: post #4

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.

Do you have any models to recommend? Especially some that could last in harsh environments (dust, high temperature, insects, ...).

Re: OpenPlotter

#66

Post by nomand »

kortilla wrote: post #60
nomand wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your labeling is only a reflection of the shape of the lens you have on the world. I'm not interested in feeding that.

It’s your labeling that put “web standards” into one bucket. I assure you many of those web standards are far more secure and well tested for not only failure cases but also adversaries than what exists in marine systems.

You're right. #notallwebstandards

Re: OpenPlotter

#67

Post by AYBABTME »

mschuster91 wrote: post #63
AYBABTME wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all Bluetooth low energy afaict, they're not exactly in the field of inventing new RF comms.

BLE? I'd stay the hell away from that. It's bad enough dealing with it in consumer context, but in something safety critical?!

All these gizmos are not safety critical. Anemometer? Wind on your face. Depth? Plenty of people go around with broken ones. SOW paddle? They're always clogged. Wind angle? Wind on your face, check telltale, check sails, check wind index. Particularly the BLE stuff are things that are nice to haves and a pain to physically wire (masthead instruments).

The only "safety critical" thing in this tech is the chart plotter (and GPS), and weather reports. Marine chartplotters are glorified consumer grade computers, and this OpenPlotter thing with OpenCPN is 1000% more reliable and not actively trying to kill you with proprietary licensing crap. Your phone is a great chartplotter and plenty of people cross oceans using nothing more than an iPad.

Re: OpenPlotter

#68

Post by tonyarkles »

nomand wrote: post #53
tonyarkles wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know... I've been working in an interesting combined AgTech and Aviation (drones, but big ones) for a while now and using JSON over Websockets for IPC is one of the best decisions we've made. We don't use it for everything, mind you, there's lower-level protocols that we use to talk to embedded hardware devices, but when we can we do. And while it's a draft standard, we basically riffed on a variant of this for m…

Thanks for sharing that! Very interesting. There is even less margin for error in air compared to at sea. At least you can still float if the power goes out and at that point a sewing machine is all you need for most critical problems past that point.

We've actually leaned in pretty hard on using "standard" protocols as much as we can:

- We have a flight planning module that takes multiple polygons as input and returns a (large) list of waypoints for covering the regions that the polygons cover. When I was trying to work out the request/response format I decided to use GeoJSON with some extra properties added. You submit the GeoJSON boundaries with a POST request, the planner does a bunch of computational geometry and graph algorithms, and returns back a GeoJSON. If you want to, you can just load the flight plan up in QGIS or ArcGIS or whatever and inspect it directly.

- We also accumulate quite a bit of geospatial data that we need to post-process. We used SQLite with the Spatialite extension to store that. Same story as the flight plans... you can really easily load it into QGIS or Geopandas or whatever you want and do your analysis

- We need to stream video down to the ground station and ended up using RTSP, h.264, and GStreamer to do that. You can connect to the video feed using our ground station software if you want, but you can also just connect to it using VLC. And internally this meant that if we wanted to do hardware-accelerated encoding it was just a matter of changing the GStreamer pipeline. Or... if I get my way over the next month or so, we'll be adding a HUD with extra telemetry right into the video feed, again using GStreamer plugins.

Re: OpenPlotter

#69

Post by bergie »

sails wrote: post #62
pnut wrote: post #3

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.

People get pretty far with tablet apps these days (literally), and there is a good market for the development of the apps. Hardware integration is always the challenge. See 59-north for examples of offshore sailing schools who seem to have found a good mix of modern and reliable https://www.sailmagazine.com/cruising/navigating-by-tablet The only thing I don’t like about a tablet is that it will ruin your night vision…

Depends on the tablet navigation software you use. Orca has a very decent night mode.

Re: OpenPlotter

#70

Post by tamimio »

keraf wrote: post #65
tamimio wrote: post #4

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.

Do you have any models to recommend? Especially some that could last in harsh environments (dust, high temperature, insects, ...).

> Do you have any models to recommend?

That depends on a lot of variables: what kind of IOs you are looking for? Do you need them isolated (DIO vs GPIO), Does it need DIN rail? Integrated screen? What connectivity is needed (wifi, cellular)? Or resources (ram, cpu, etc.)? What’s the power delivery requirements?

So there’s a lot of factors that only you can answer given you know the application, but since you are looking for dust proof, then you should look for fanless AND ventless one, and one that’s vibration resistant (obviously with an SSD), and most of them can survive high temperatures, but personally I would even add it in a panel to provide extra protection, with a fan and proper ventilation just in case.

I did try some of them, like onlogic (1) and arestech (2) among others, and don’t restrict yourself to the brands, some Chinese (mostly cheaper) ones are good enough for the job like GigaIPC (3) and others too.

(1) https://www.onlogic.com/pub/media/resources/Brochures/LogicS...

(2) https://www.arestech.com.tw

(3) https://www.gigaipc.com/en/index.php?action=products2&cid=2&...

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