OpenMarine

Hello community

I'm completely new here and really exciting by this new "world" of raspberry possibilities on sailboats.
I'm actually have a complete simrad system on my old sailboat from 1981.
Simrad system from 2014, with 12inch plotter, sonar, radar3G, AIS, and Autopilot. But by safety i would like to have another system which could be reliable. Actually i'm using a laptop with opencpn etc ... but laptop fly everywhere in the cabin when the sea is hard, and batteries on laptop are old and lazy now.
Raspberry with openplotter looks great and "easy" to do.
I just want to know before ordering the material and read many times the docs and installation process, if it'will be possible to take out of the raspberry pi the gps informations (in nmea 2000 format) and connect it by wires to my vhf which require gps info for the "mayday" automatic button (the mayday button will send a preregistered distress message and add the gps location of the boat on the safety radio channel).

It looks to me possible, but without the stuff in my hands, i'd like to know if somebody could confirm that, and maybe did it already for the same reason ?

Thank by advance 

Laurent

(2021-09-23, 04:47 PM)laurent74 Wrote: [ -> ]Hello community

I'm completely new here and really exciting by this new "world" of raspberry possibilities on sailboats.
I'm actually have a complete simrad system on my old sailboat from 1981.
Simrad system from 2014, with 12inch plotter, sonar, radar3G, AIS, and Autopilot. But by safety i would like to have another system which could be reliable. Actually i'm using a laptop with opencpn etc ... but laptop fly everywhere in the cabin when the sea is hard, and batteries on laptop are old and lazy now.
Raspberry with openplotter looks great and "easy" to do.
I just want to know before ordering the material and read many times the docs and installation process, if it'will be possible to take out of the raspberry pi the gps informations (in nmea 2000 format) and connect it by wires to my vhf which require gps info for the "mayday" automatic button (the mayday button will send a preregistered distress message and add the gps location of the boat on the safety radio channel).

It looks to me possible, but without the stuff in my hands, i'd like to know if somebody could confirm that, and maybe did it already for the same reason ?

Thank by advance 

Laurent

Hello Laurent,

Welcome to the club!

Yes, Openplotter on an RPi is a great way to connect various marine devices like in your scenario.
What you need is some way to connect your RPi to NMEA2000, e.g. a USB-NMEA2000 converter, or an NMEA2000 hat on the RPi.

In a scenario where you can/want to feed NMEA0183 in stead off NMEA2000 data from the RPi into your radio, that's possible too. Often a simple USB-serial converter works just fine. The NMEA0183 solution is less expensive than the NMEA2000 and great for trying things out.

Enjoy your journey into Openplotter!

Thanks a lot for your confirmation @beercansailor , I'll check about the entry nmea required by my vhf (if it's 183 or 2000) and I'll order everything to make a great installation.

Hope it's going well and i could return here my experience