OpenPlotter

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Can I get away with saying it depends...

Mat started to look into this for two main reasons, firstly the age of the equipment on Allegra means its getting to the rip and replace stage, as once one piece of equipment is upgraded it gets more difficult to make that system to talk to something else without additional hardware. The marine navigation equipment is all perfectly working and serviceable it just isn't easy to update. Second, Allegra has a navigation table that at one point had space for a plotter or even might have had a plotter but was now covered up with a piece of plastic.

During the winter of 2020-2021, Mat started to research what OpenPlotter could bring to the table. You need:

• A Raspberry Pi
• A way to interface to your navigation equipment or a GPS receiver
• A screen & Keyboard/mouse

and that's it... You have an out-of-the-box working Chartplotter. There are going to be a lot of things you want to add to this, such as sensors and other software (UK Charts for one!) but for relatively a small amount of money you have a working system.

Now the basics were understood and SignalK and OpenCPN were setup to gather data from the boats navigational systems, it was clear that more could be done. AIS and engine data were two areas that could be explored further, however, the Pi3 was a little sluggish when trying to run a web browser and OpenCPN at the same time. Cooling was also an issue so it was time to address this before expanding the project.

With the increased performance of the Pi4 and now AIS, this information can be streamed from OpenPlotter over to other applications such as Navionics. In this video we set that up and show the options if you want to export other data to different software or hardware that might be running on your boat.

The project required some additional engine sensors in order to meet the above which could be different if you wanted to copy the setup. This video shows the sensors we used to get that information out of the engine. It also covers some of the calibrations that were required to make the information accruate.

OpenPlotter v3 has now been released which supports a 64-bit operating system. It has been rewritten from the ground up and is faster than ever. In this video, we cover the points you need to consider when you upgrade and look at what's changed if you are new to this software.

The engine project now includes bilge monitoring which can be adapted to your requirements. Any switch sensor can be used to trigger something and give you an alert or notification. Have a look at this video if you want to add this to your project.

This is set to be the best board to integrate a Raspberry Pi to your boat electronics, The MacArthur Hat from OpenMarine. We get a test board and show some of whats possible.

Our new setup for 2024, a Pi5, NVMe base SSD, MacArthur Hat and OpenPlotter 4!