How do you actually sail with OpenPlotter?

[PaddyB]

 how do you actually sail with OpenPlotter?

As a full time cruiser probably different to many but very important for me is *assume all the toys will break!* 
So anything other than a really easy coastal hop in good weather a quick passage plan is done beforehand, opencpn makes this simple. Then nothing is needed in the cockpit other than the compass  to stay safe if something goes wrong.
Saying that, usually it's tablet running opencpn on android on a stand under the sprayhood, opencpn must have as good an ais display as there is, plus using satellite images as charts can be extremely  useful. Planning often done on a laptop, sasplanet is very useful addition on windows for this as it's simple to jump between sat images & navionic/cmap. Some areas I've marine traffic density images as charts in opencpn to see where the quieter parts of the ocean are. Then the navobj.xml file can b copied over to the pi & tablet using filezilla so all machines are in sync. 
Also massively powerful is recording everything 24/7 to influxdb and viewed in grafana, so batteries especially can be watched carefully to check they're actually getting charged , wind is fascinating seeing the sea breeze building and veering most days. Even the fridge thermostat is an esp32 talking signalk these days 

All in all a raspberry pi with openplotter/signalk provides things which just a few years ago could only have been dreamed about for so little power and so little cost.