2021-08-16, 08:17 PM
openplotter is a collection of scripts that facilitate installing and managing various applications useful on boats. One such application is OpenCPN, another signalk, and another pypilot. There are many more. It is especially targeted for raspberry pi but other hardware can be used.
I do not think a wired lan is much more reliable but consider wifi can hiccup at times so I keep wifi out of the control loop. For example you can send wind data over wifi to pypilot on a separate pi, but it may lag a bit. Generally the compass is used to fill the gaps as pypilot follows a compass course which is adjusted to match the desired wind angle in the basic pilot, but it depends on the algorithm selected. With the wind pilot (which ignores compass) it would matter, but in this case it would be recommended to feed wind directly to the pi running pypilot, and the wind data is then relayed over wifi for use in instruments.
So it really depends on what you are trying to do, but general wifi works ok and is a lot easier to set up.
I do not think a wired lan is much more reliable but consider wifi can hiccup at times so I keep wifi out of the control loop. For example you can send wind data over wifi to pypilot on a separate pi, but it may lag a bit. Generally the compass is used to fill the gaps as pypilot follows a compass course which is adjusted to match the desired wind angle in the basic pilot, but it depends on the algorithm selected. With the wind pilot (which ignores compass) it would matter, but in this case it would be recommended to feed wind directly to the pi running pypilot, and the wind data is then relayed over wifi for use in instruments.
So it really depends on what you are trying to do, but general wifi works ok and is a lot easier to set up.