Adding AIS targets

[Uncle Augie]

So I am racing the Pt Huron to Mackinac Race next weekend and have access to a low bandwidth listing of my section. We are using OpenCPN and weather routing for navigation and putting out a NMEA feed for out tablets on deck for optimizing performance in realtime. What I would like to know is if there is a way I can add ais targets with a script. The file will be the exact same format every time. A txt file with boat information including lat/long, speed and heading along with when the last time reporting. What I would like to do is add these boats, 12, as ais targets on the open cpn screen. Failing this I am sure I could upload them as waypoints which may be a easier task. Here is a link to the file from the race last year.
http://yb.tl/l/chicagomack2014?class=beneteau36.7
Thoughts anyone? Thanks

[barnakiel]

Why not convert AIS data to wpt (marks) data and drop the marks rather than the AIS objects?

Then it would be just like you upload any other WPTs file.

b.

[Uncle Augie]

Originally Posted by barnakiel

Why not convert AIS data to wpt (marks) data and drop the marks rather than the AIS objects?

Then it would be just like you upload any other WPTs file.

b.

This is the easy, dirty way. Adding them as AIS targets would be a more elegant solution IMHO.

[nohal]

Of course you can. Take the data, convert it to AIS NMEA messages, broadcast over a network or save them to a text file and play it using the VDR plugin.
Is there something that already does it? Depending on whether you prefer Java or python, you may have a look at https://github.com/dma-ais/AisLib and https://softwaredevelopmentperestroi...odingdecoding/

If you are good with just the positions, you can save yourself the trouble with encoding AIVDM and generate just normal WPL sentence, which OpenCPN can treat as APRS position reports (treated similarly to AIS) if you have it enabled as described in http://opencpn.org/ocpn/ais

Pavel