remote boatimu

[AndyV]

Still, it's what I want to try; if the IMU refresh rate is 100ms I don't mind losing a few millisecs on wifi pingtime.

It isn't deterministic.  You do not have guarenteed latency.  So unless you use a dedicated wireless link (not using raspberry wifi at all) for this, you may end up with something that works most of the time but occasionally does not react.  I have seen wifi on raspberry link get stalled up to a few seconds.


If you want a wireless link somewhere between the imu sensors and the motor moving the rudder it needs dedicated link, either two esp32, or some other rf link that does not use linux wifi/bluetooth stack.

This is an old post of yours but curious if your thoughts have changed. I'm just getting started with the whole OpenPlotter setup, have all the parts and have been playing with a few ESP32's for sensors around the boat. I love the way I can connect the sensors wirelessly and so, naturally, I thought why not the IMU via an ESP32 as it's time to start working on the autopilot. Then I got thinking about latency, lapses due to interference, etc.

Then I got thinking about mounting, you'd want the IMU mounted as close to the actual rudder as possible, and along the centerline of the boat I'd guess so that it "feels" what the rudder has to work with. That puts my RPi5 quite a ways away.
the 
Is it best practice to have a second dedicated Pi or similar for pypilot running as close as possible to the IMU and then an NMEA0182 from the Pi to the ST4000's controller?

Sorry, I'm sure this has been covered, I've tried searching but the forum search is a little wonky, and I've been considering the ESP32s wirelessly until now so maybe looking in all the wrong places.