OpenPlotter project

[Saqqara]

So eager to try the new release. I've been checking your website daily.

Interested to see how the voltage probes will be configured. I want to put one for exhaust temp, one for engine (water) temp, one for sea water temp, and a fourth for the ice box temperature.

Which humidity sensor(s) will be supported? DHT22?

Voltage monitor for house battery bank remains my top wish list item for the future.

[Sailoog]

Originally Posted by Saqqara

So eager to try the new release. I've been checking your website daily.

Interested to see how the voltage probes will be configured. I want to put one for exhaust temp, one for engine (water) temp, one for sea water temp, and a fourth for the ice box temperature.

Which humidity sensor(s) will be supported? DHT22?

Voltage monitor for house battery bank remains my top wish list item for the future.

Don't worry Saqqara I will announce the new release here

but if you are impatient here there is an image for the test team with raspbian jessie and most of the improvements implemented. There is an interface for alarms feature but is not working yet, true wind calculation with GPS is erratic and there are some detected bugs in NMEA output window.

https://mega.nz/#!HBpVAR4L!VxCja3JiH...BUrrctH4lg-MnY

Since it is a beta and provisional version, do not spread too much this link because still contains bugs.

You can connect as many DS18B20 temperature sensors to the same pins in parallel as you want but I am afraid we have implemented the possibility of managing just one that we have called "Engine coolant temperature". But you are right it should be able to manage some more. Let me study this.

Humidity sensors supported are HTS221 and HTU21D, cheap and reliable ones.

We are also studying the best way of monitoring voltage but I am afraid next release will not contain this yet.

[sailsunfurled]

Sailoog,

Thanks for the commands. I changed the frequency within the code to the local NOAA weather station and could see and receive traffic. So my SDR works, we must not have much AIS traffic. Tested out on the local music stations as well.

Thanks again.

Originally Posted by Sailoog

Sorry for delay in answering, really busy coding...

So, antenna is ok and you should have targets... Do you have the dongle plugged to the raspberry? you will need an auto-powered usb hub because rtl-sdr draws more power than your raspberry can serve.

If this doesn't work, open a terminal window and type:

cd
cd .config/openplotter
python openplotter.py

this will open openplotter in debug mode and you can see what is going on when you enable AIS reception. Fill in your calibration values and let me know what openplotter says.

[sailsunfurled]

I have been looking at these 3 Channel Current / Voltage Monitor

This is on my wish list as well.

Originally Posted by Saqqara

So eager to try the new release. I've been checking your website daily.

Interested to see how the voltage probes will be configured. I want to put one for exhaust temp, one for engine (water) temp, one for sea water temp, and a fourth for the ice box temperature.

Which humidity sensor(s) will be supported? DHT22?

Voltage monitor for house battery bank remains my top wish list item for the future.

[Sailoog]

Originally Posted by sailsunfurled

I have been looking at these 3 Channel Current / Voltage Monitor

This is on my wish list as well.

Really interesting board, but I have read on their site that is 2A maximum.

[sailsunfurled]

Correct on the 2 amp on board but that does not limit you. If you are going to measure any large amount of current, you will need to add a external shunt. Scale the 2 Amp normal voltage differential to say a 500 amp shunt differential.

I have one set up on my bench running on a Pi. Its a good voltmeter but not useful in the context of a integrated boat system monitor. That's why I am interested in your programing efforts to integrate this concept to OpenPlotter. This would be useful to have a way to monitor and the data be available on the local screen, on the Wifi and the NMEA bus.

Originally Posted by Sailoog

Really interesting board, but I have read on their site that is 2A maximum.

[Sailoog]

Originally Posted by sailsunfurled

Correct on the 2 amp on board but that does not limit you. If you are going to measure any large amount of current, you will need to add a external shunt. Scale the 2 Amp normal voltage differential to say a 500 amp shunt differential.

I have one set up on my bench running on a Pi. Its a good voltmeter but not useful in the context of a integrated boat system monitor. That's why I am interested in your programing efforts to integrate this concept to OpenPlotter. This would be useful to have a way to monitor and the data be available on the local screen, on the Wifi and the NMEA bus.

Yes, definitely OpenPlotter will implement that feature as we find the most compact and reliable way, yours can be a perfect one. Monitoring voltage/current of different sources (batteries bank, solar panels, general consumption...) and being able to send values even remotely will be exciting. Besides with the new system of switches, triggers, actions, etc. of OpenPlotter, we will be able to react to power data variations and even in a future activate external devices... amazing

[NahanniV]

As you develop these new features have you given some thought to making this multi platform ?

It seems that the Video hardware on the Rpi2 may be a problem, there are certainly other boards that are much better in this respect.

Cheers,
JM.

[Sailoog]

Originally Posted by NahanniV

As you develop these new features have you given some thought to making this multi platform ?

It seems that the Video hardware on the Rpi2 may be a problem, there are certainly other boards that are much better in this respect.

Cheers,
JM.

Yes, one of the goals was to be multi-platform but it is true that during development, openplotter has become more hardware dependent than we wanted. We chose raspberry because has a huge community and that made things go faster. When main development is done we will try to port to the other ARM platforms based on Debian therefore we always choose common packages.

Voltage/current monitoring by I2C would be great because all boards have it and works similar.

[pcmm]

Any thoughts of being able to deal with seatalk data?

[Sailoog]

Originally Posted by pcmm

Any thoughts of being able to deal with seatalk data?

Supporting seatalk involves hardware elements due to the parity bit differences. It needs software decoders too. Since seatalk is a proprietary and obsolete system, it is not one of our priorities (yes, NMEA 0183 is obsolete and proprietary too but it will be a lot of time with us).

However, it is a very expanded system, so we would like to do something. We will wait for Signal K project to be mature and to do the software task and then we will promote or build the needed hardware. Actually this hardware is quite cheap and simple but seatalk converters on the market are really expensive.

If Signal K project is not successful we could try to implement unidirectional de-codification.

Same situation with NMEA 2000.

[muttnik]

Originally Posted by pcmm

Any thoughts of being able to deal with seatalk data?

As sailoog said, the requirement for additional hardware is a problem, especially when it comes to support. I played around with this last year when considering putting seatalk conversion into kplex but decided against it. Firstly you've got to worry about whether people have soldered up the board to change to RS232 signalling (and then down to ttl if going in to the pi's uart). Next problem is with usb to serial converters. You're relying on being able to set space parity and have parity errors correctly flagged up in order to detect seatalk command bytes. I found that several converters (including some big name brands) had issues: sometimes with not being able to set space/mark parity, sometimes just incorrect flagging of parity errors.

Next up is collision management. For this you shouldn't really be using anything in userspace on a multitasking computer. If you want to *send* seatalk, a microcontroller is probably a better plan.

I recently acquired an arduino with a vague notion of putting it between my raspberry pi and my seatalk bus

[pcmm]

this guy seems to be able to read seatalk with minimal hardware and a bit oc C code

Thomas Knauf Â*Â*Â*Â*SeaTalk Technical Reference

could this be leveraged?

[rgleason]

Gadgetpoole.de

[muttnik]

Originally Posted by pcmm

could this be leveraged?

See previous post