Ideal Boat Computer?

[CarinaPDX]

Originally Posted by JAFO

For what it's worth, Ubuntu 18.04.2 with the Mate desktop is also available for the Pi: https://ubuntu-mate.org/raspberry-pi/

I meant that the Pi has less choice than an Intel box; there are quite a few alternative OSes for the Pi due to its standardization and broad acceptance. The Odroids have a more limited choice, and the N-2 being new (shipping less than 2 months) will be evolving over the next few months although it appears to be usable now. The reason for the N-2 over Pi is an approximate 6X performance improvement. I have a Pi 3 with a media center build and it just doesn't cut it for me - just too damn slow. I read elsewhere someone reporting a single frame/second update for OCPN on a Pi. Yes it should work but too marginal, at least by my standards. And in the end the number of OS choices is not relevant; what matters is if there is one that is acceptable and operational.

Greg

[El Pinguino]

Given the OPs situation..
'. Most sailors on here never do any serious navigation and don't care, but some of us have to by the nature of the kind of sailing we do. For those of us, we have a choice of either doing traditional paper chart work, or doing it on a large screen, preferably with raster charts, and with a tool like OpenCPN which makes doing real navigation possible. There is a strong impetus to that even for the oldest farts and most hard-core chart work guys among us because of the sheer impossibility of storing and keeping updated the massive amount of paper it would take to cover a large cruising area, like in my case, almost the entirety of Northern Europe and the old Viking seaways from Greenland to Russia, and South into the Bay of Biscay, latitude 45N to above 70N, longitude 28W to beyond 28E. That's the waters of 15 countries, some of them explored in great detail over more than 30,000 miles of sailing over the last 10 years. I guess I have more than 1000 charts on my boat computer, a significant number of which I do update every year.

So for some of us a boat computer is definitely not just a tech toy.'

... I would suggest he should be speaking to these people... https://www.kongsberg.com/maritime/p...solution=13388

[mikedefieslife]

Originally Posted by CarinaPDX

I meant that the Pi has less choice than an Intel box; there are quite a few alternative OSes for the Pi due to its standardization and broad acceptance. The Odroids have a more limited choice, and the N-2 being new (shipping less than 2 months) will be evolving over the next few months although it appears to be usable now. The reason for the N-2 over Pi is an approximate 6X performance improvement. I have a Pi 3 with a media center build and it just doesn't cut it for me - just too damn slow. I read elsewhere someone reporting a single frame/second update for OCPN on a Pi. Yes it should work but too marginal, at least by my standards. And in the end the number of OS choices is not relevant; what matters is if there is one that is acceptable and operational.

Greg

The N2 will be miles faster in terms of the CPU. The graphics are also a lot faster but that won't help much as driver support is likely to be limited. Odriods even say this on their website.

Lack of wifi out of the box is a pain (even though my Pi is wired). It also seems the USB 2/3 bus is shared, and the booting from SSD requires a bit of a workaround.

So not as versatile as a Pi, but should be plenty quick enough for OpenCPN and any navigation tasks.

[conachair]

Originally Posted by CarinaPDX

. I read elsewhere someone reporting a single frame/second update for OCPN on a Pi. Yes it should work but too marginal, at least by my standards.

Something badly wrong with a setup if it's so slow,
How fast do you need?
Plenty fast enough for me on a Pi b

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcrQZ2j_rWo

[mikedefieslife]

Originally Posted by conachair

Something badly wrong with a setup if it's so slow,
How fast do you need?
Plenty fast enough for me on a Pi b

Not really. I my Pi3B+ would easily drop down into single digits with zooming and panning, and that's before you add AIS, RADAR, and the rest. Around 11-15 is the average I see. For smooth scrolling is should be double that or more.

The video you posted doesn't exactly look smooth does it? And there's nothing going on there.

Compare it to the video I posted earlier and the thread of the Nvidia Jetson, and there's a massive difference. The Jetson is super smooth, whilst also playing two video streams. OK that is at the extreme end but still.

Interestingly OpenCPN 5 now no longer displays the FPS, so we can't ask people to post their results. I wonder why they dropped that in the display but still have the option for it in the menu?

[conachair]

Originally Posted by mikedefieslife

The video you posted doesn't exactly look smooth does it? And there's nothing going on there. No routes, tracks, plugins etc..

Better in real life, the judder comes from youtube. Just tried with a route and some tracks with 2 dashboards open. Plus the Pi is streaming web radio and running signalk with current measurements coming in 5 times a second then getting written to a database. Zooming a little hesitant but can't see how it's anything but plenty useable. Easy to see here when the web radio was turned on, hifiberry amp drawing less than 100mA then with Opencpn running towards the end it draws another 60mA. If there was anything like Openplotter as a one stop image with everything preinstalled & setup something like the NVIDIA Jetson would be a much more tempting alternative, looks like it doesn't even have wifi? Anyway, the Pi is plenty capable as a main nav/monitoring system onboard imho.

[mikedefieslife]

Originally Posted by conachair

Better in real life, the judder comes from youtube. Just tried with a route and some tracks with 2 dashboards open. Plus the Pi is streaming web radio and running signalk with current measurements coming in 5 times a second then getting written to a database. Zooming a little hesitant but can't see how it's anything but plenty useable. Easy to see here when the web radio was turned on, hifiberry amp drawing less than 100mA then with Opencpn running towards the end it draws another 60mA. If there was anything like Openplotter as a one stop image with everything preinstalled & setup something like the NVIDIA Jetson would be a much more tempting alternative, looks like it doesn't even have wifi? Anyway, the Pi is plenty capable as a main nav/monitoring system onboard imho.

I find it useable but not smooth enough. That being said it's no slower than my ageing NSS8, which I happily use.

The Pi is by fair the best out of the box system. As you say the Jetson doesn't have wifi, either does the N2 and it's connectivity is limited too. A Pi4 must be on the cards this year. I'd expect it to have the A73 too given that CPU is 2 years old now, and would give the Pi 64 bit capabilities.

[markdj]

So, I finally got measuring the current draw on the mini Windows pc I got from droidbox.

Power draw about 0.2 - 0.4 amps that's through a 24-12v converter so probably double that with a 12v system. Considering the 2 hdmi out, VGA out, WiFi, Bluetooth, ethernet, usb etc, it's a fine wee box that has worked flawlessly for about 600NM so far.

[250224]

Originally Posted by markdj

So, I finally got measuring the current draw on the mini Windows pc I got from droidbox.

Power draw about 0.2 - 0.4 amps that's through a 24-12v converter so probably double that with a 12v system. Considering the 2 hdmi out, VGA out, WiFi, Bluetooth, ethernet, usb etc, it's a fine wee box that has worked flawlessly for about 600NM so far.

Thank you. That would be 0.4 amps * 2 * 12 V = ~10 W, right? If this was measured while running some software then it is rather frugal power consumption I think.

[conachair]

Might be of interest regarding linux, lots more on his channel >

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAGWMutbwmk

[AnthonyLeMarin]

Greetings!

Linux is actually super easy to setup.
No longer do you need to go through the hassle of installing drivers and the such.

With most of the modern Linux distributions, everything will be done automagically for you.

I'm using Fedora but i think the easiest would be Xubuntu or another flavour of Ubuntu as it's quite light on resources and not hard to learn. Xubuntu has a similar layout as Windows so most things are second nature.

It really does make the computer faster and applications run smoother on low powered systems.

It also takes way less hard disk space and is hands down more reliable in the long term.

I hope this helps and eases some of you from jumping in the Linux ship

[Andreas W]

Originally Posted by AnthonyLeMarin

Greetings!

Linux is actually super easy to setup.
No longer do you need to go through the hassle of installing drivers and the such.

With most of the modern Linux distributions, everything will be done automagically for you.

I'm using Fedora but i think the easiest would be Xubuntu or another flavour of Ubuntu as it's quite light on resources and not hard to learn. Xubuntu has a similar layout as Windows so most things are second nature.

It really does make the computer faster and applications run smoother on low powered systems.

It also takes way less hard disk space and is hands down more reliable in the long term.

I hope this helps and eases some of you from jumping in the Linux ship

I used to have a little ASUS Laptop with Ubuntu on it, and it was working great. Fast, easy to use, and very reliable. And for some stuff that really really needs Windows, I had a VM with Windows 7.

[singlerider]

+1 for Linux.

[mikedefieslife]

Originally Posted by AnthonyLeMarin

Greetings!

Linux is actually super easy to setup.
No longer do you need to go through the hassle of installing drivers and the such.

With most of the modern Linux distributions, everything will be done automagically for you.

I'm using Fedora but i think the easiest would be Xubuntu or another flavour of Ubuntu as it's quite light on resources and not hard to learn. Xubuntu has a similar layout as Windows so most things are second nature.

It really does make the computer faster and applications run smoother on low powered systems.

It also takes way less hard disk space and is hands down more reliable in the long term.

I hope this helps and eases some of you from jumping in the Linux ship

This has been the case since at least 2004 when I started playing with Linux. I remember finding an old 350mhz PC in the trash and then proceeding to do a stage 2 install of Gentoo. Used it as a router for a year or two.

The downside of Linux is that touch UI in most of the distributions and programs is woeful at best, especially automatic keyboards and the like.

[skkeith]

For me I think the ideal boat computer would be "Core Elec" for OpenCPN. I actually don't want to know what OS I am running while I am sailing. If something goes wrong (in software) I don't want to mess with the OS, just replace the micro sd card and be done with it. If something goes wrong hardware, it should be cheap enough so I can have a backup or two onboard.