2021-05-25, 01:44 PM
Hi, it's me again...
This time, it's about Sailor Hat for Raspberry Pi. I was bugged about having to treat the onboard Raspberry Pi server different from all other marine electronics. Why would I have to shut the Raspberry Pi down manually before flicking off the electronics switch at the electrical panel? I don't want to teach that to anyone who might be borrowing the boat. And why couldn't I power the Raspberry Pi through the NMEA 2000 bus like most other electronics? And why are most Raspberry Pi NMEA 2000 interfaces unisolated, inducing potentially a huge amount of noise to the power and signal wires?
To solve all these issues, I designed the Sailor Hat for Raspberry Pi (SH-RPi in short). SH-RPi is a power management and NMEA 2000 (CAN) interface hat on steroids. The board accepts an 8-32V input and uses a 60F supercapacitor as an intermediate power buffer, providing ample power for controlled shutdowns as well as a buffer for instantaneous peak power use and protection against power glitches. The input current is limited to 0.8A (at 12V), meaning that powering it via the NMEA 2000 bus still complies to the N2K spec.
The CAN interface is isolated and compliant to the N2K spec. It has been designed to use custom GPIO pins for the SPI interface, allowing simultaneous use with SPI displays or e.g. a Moitessier HAT (for the non-RTC version only, due to an I2C address clash with the RTC chip).
The design is all open hardware and open source with designs and software available at GitHub. See the documentation site for more information. I also have waterproof enclosure kits available at hatlabs.fi.
I'd regard the SH-RPi as a perfect companion for OpenPlotter: it solves all power management issues for the Pi and provides essential connectivity for your onboard computer. The OpenPlotter device can be powered from the same electronics circuit on the electrical panel as everything else and turned off by flicking the switch. No worries about corrupted memory cards.
Here's a sample photo of a SH-RPi on a Raspberry Pi in a waterproof enclosure, powered via NMEA 2000.
![[Image: SH-RPi-enclosure-kit-powered.jpg]](https://hatlabs.fi/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SH-RPi-enclosure-kit-powered.jpg)
This time, it's about Sailor Hat for Raspberry Pi. I was bugged about having to treat the onboard Raspberry Pi server different from all other marine electronics. Why would I have to shut the Raspberry Pi down manually before flicking off the electronics switch at the electrical panel? I don't want to teach that to anyone who might be borrowing the boat. And why couldn't I power the Raspberry Pi through the NMEA 2000 bus like most other electronics? And why are most Raspberry Pi NMEA 2000 interfaces unisolated, inducing potentially a huge amount of noise to the power and signal wires?
To solve all these issues, I designed the Sailor Hat for Raspberry Pi (SH-RPi in short). SH-RPi is a power management and NMEA 2000 (CAN) interface hat on steroids. The board accepts an 8-32V input and uses a 60F supercapacitor as an intermediate power buffer, providing ample power for controlled shutdowns as well as a buffer for instantaneous peak power use and protection against power glitches. The input current is limited to 0.8A (at 12V), meaning that powering it via the NMEA 2000 bus still complies to the N2K spec.
The CAN interface is isolated and compliant to the N2K spec. It has been designed to use custom GPIO pins for the SPI interface, allowing simultaneous use with SPI displays or e.g. a Moitessier HAT (for the non-RTC version only, due to an I2C address clash with the RTC chip).
The design is all open hardware and open source with designs and software available at GitHub. See the documentation site for more information. I also have waterproof enclosure kits available at hatlabs.fi.
I'd regard the SH-RPi as a perfect companion for OpenPlotter: it solves all power management issues for the Pi and provides essential connectivity for your onboard computer. The OpenPlotter device can be powered from the same electronics circuit on the electrical panel as everything else and turned off by flicking the switch. No worries about corrupted memory cards.
Here's a sample photo of a SH-RPi on a Raspberry Pi in a waterproof enclosure, powered via NMEA 2000.