2018-02-13, 10:45 AM
I have a dAISy Hat and there are a couple of things about it not generally known. For one it will work stand alone without a Raspi and can interface to any device with TTL level RS-232 inputs such as Arduino or you can use a TTL to RS-232/422 converter and hook it up to a finder/plotter like a Lowrance HDS or similar. The other feature is it can multiplex an additional TTL level RS-232 device such as a GPS module and send it to the Raspi along with the AIS data. There is one drawback for the Raspi 3 and that is when you use it as a hat it uses the only UART which means the Bluetooth has to be disabled since it uses that UART by default. Personally that's not a problem for me. I used mine standalone with a NEO-8M GPS module with remote antenna (it allows me to put the antenna directly above the transom mount depth/downscan/sidescan transducer for more accurate depth mapping in Reefmaster) and fed it through a TTL to RS-422 converter and to my Lowrance Elite 7 Ti which has an AIS function. I fish on the Upper Mississippi River and that allows me to monitor barge and large boat traffic. This year I'll use it along with the GPS, a Temp/pressure/humidity sensor, a sensor for heading and possibly other sensors along with a Raspi 3 and send some of the info through a RS-422 converter to my finder/plotter and everything via WiFi to my Windows Tablet and Android devices. I'm also attempting to make a fishing database in MS Access that will automagically grab position, air temp, baro pressure, depth, and water temp and enter it into the database so all I have to enter manually is the fish data. (type, length weight, bait used, etc.) That's probably the hardest part since I'm a hardware guy (Electrical Engineer) and not really a software guy (coder)