2017-06-16, 06:18 PM
Hummm, you got me to thinking. I built a WIFI autohelm remote using an ESP-12 several months ago. The intention was that it would interface with Seatalk and push the right commands into the bus to convince the Autohelm that it was getting commands from a Seatalk Autohelm controller. My design works with the boat's WIFI network (thanks to OpenPlotter) and allows control from a smartphone browser. I could never get it to talk properly to the Seatalk network, so shelved the project for a while while working on other things.
Looking at this, providing a relay output to the existing design would be trivial, and would avoid the issues of emulating SeaTalk. All that would be needed would be to pick up a few GPIOs from the ESP-12.
What would also be interesting is that once on the WiFi network, it would also be fairly trivial to have NodeRED also send commands via REST, as that's how the existing smartphone interface works. So, you would get a certain level of automatic control from OpenPlotter, without getting involved in NMEA-SeaTalk interchanges.
Looking at this, providing a relay output to the existing design would be trivial, and would avoid the issues of emulating SeaTalk. All that would be needed would be to pick up a few GPIOs from the ESP-12.
What would also be interesting is that once on the WiFi network, it would also be fairly trivial to have NodeRED also send commands via REST, as that's how the existing smartphone interface works. So, you would get a certain level of automatic control from OpenPlotter, without getting involved in NMEA-SeaTalk interchanges.