Public Discussion Forum

I didn't want to hi-jack Marks post about AIS and I'm a big supporter of the idea. I have a ground station that is up pretty close to 100% of the time. My roving is normally only about 50% on when we're underway but its fun to see the gaps that are filled in when I have it running.

Given all that, I would like to suggest if someone is to go through the effort to setup an internet based roving AIS station, consider also adding weather info to your roving stations design. Depending on how you set that up there may be little effort to send WX as well.

Making that very localized weather info public can be very helpful to someone else following the same off-shore route or looking for a place to hide from the wind. I discovered that this year while crossing and exiting the Bahamas as well as our run North for the Summer. I used other boat info several times and it worked out well enough that I was encouraged to do the same and help others by providing it too.

I do both AIS and WX with a Raspberry PI and Signal-k. Getting the NMEA data to the PI is just a NMEA gateway to connect the two networks. The software to broadcast are both simple add-ons to the Signal-K installation. I currently have a windy account that I transmit basic weather info to. With Signal-k, passing WX info to Windy works pretty much the same way as the AIS connections to Marine traffic and AIS Hub.

Signal-K is a very simple but powerful and configurable tool that can do just about anything you can dream up in terms of data collection, manipulation, sharing and storage. You-tube has plenty of videos to explain and demonstrate the PI and Signal-K and how they can be used to supplement aging marine electronics or even replace them, in some cases.

Joe and Linda

401 Play

2009 Selene 55078

What are you using onboard to collect “weather”. I used to have a quartermaster record it every hour in the ship’s log but I’m pretty sure Tracy is unwilling to be Leizu’s quartermaster 🤨

I do have a garmin wind direction and speed device and that posts messages to NMEA via my chartplotter. Is that what u mean by “Weather”? I see the wind messages in SignalK so I could forward them somewhere…

Still haven’t really found a killer app for my little Raspberry Pi, interesting but mostly redundant of other capabilities I have.

Corey
Sent from my iPhone

Hi Rchard -

I just got SignalK up and running on Roadrunner, I'm using a Dell Workstation Win 11 laptop as the ship's computer (a machine I happen to have). The use case was logging all NMEA 2000 traffic (environment, navigation, engine) and DC flow/battery/charger data. With that data create custom displays of current data with out-of-bounds threshhold notification, and historical data for trend analysis/forensics. A functional requirement is that internet access is not required, no data leaves the boat, no data is stored on a server I do not control (e.g., no cloud services, no third party storage).

I've installed three programs as Windows services, so they launch when the machine boots up:

SignalK server - handles connections and converts NMEA 2000 PGNs to SignalK protocol

QueryDB - time series database to store the SignalK information, SQL queryable

Grafana - graphing/display program, consumes data from QueryDB so you can see it

The laptop receives data from via an ethernet switch, I've found that hardwired connections always work better than wireless. Connected via ethernet to the switch are:

the laptop

Actisense NGT-1, supplies all NMEA 2000 traffic

Victron Cerbo GX, supplies DC electrical system data

There are additional inputs, those two are the ones relevant to this post.

It took roughly four days to go from knowing nothing about SignalK to having it work the way I wanted to. I'm only at the begining of where I want this to go, but the above is a basic outline of what was needed given the hardware I had.

There are hardware costs (NGT-1, Cerbo GX) and a computer to run the software on. The software I'm using is open source so no cost there, particularly nice if you discover you don't like something - delete it and look for something more your style.

If you want more details or ideas, I'm happy to elaborate on the above. When we're running I have the laptop up (it also runs Coastal Explorer as part of our electronic cartography setup) and the SignalK server is logging data at the same rate it is broadcast onto the NMEA 2000 network, QueryDB makes it easy for an SQL programmer (me) to extract datasets I want, and Grafana is a highly configurable display engine for producing custom "pages" of data that I want to look at. Kinda fun!

rob

Roadrunner

2007 Selene 49 deep hull 48-029

Weather and Monitoring integration are cool for sure. But honestly, SignalK is a fickle beast that requires a rather tech savvy individual to setup and maintain. One small misstep can brick a plug-in requiring a full wipe, telnet sessions, ugh. Most boaters aren’t yet on first-base with position tracking and have no proclivity for servers, gateways, backbones, databases, plug-ins, etc. Mark, If I recall, one of the considerations for excluding Saillogger from consideration was its requirement for hardware necessary to run SignalK and the complexity around that setup. I expressed this to the proprietor of Saillogger and he developed a solution for the KISS crowd that gets boaters to first base without any new hardware or complexity.

That service is called AISFleet.com. It is free, and all you need is an MMSI and an email address.

Open it in a browser on your phone or computer for a personalized AIS tracking experience.

The free (basic) level lets you to participate in one fleet—for example, the Selene East Coast Fleet—and “follow” up to five boats. You can message those boats (vessel to vessel), get notifications when they move, and see 24 hours of track history. The Selene East and West Coast Fleets have already been compiled. If you later want more fleets, to follow more than five boats, or longer tracking histories the paid plans start at $1.99/month.

Like MarineTraffic, AISFleet.com supports search, but it also adds map layers so you can control screen clutter. Open your Follow-list to filter out the noise, then add other traffic back selectively if you want to see what is happening around boats you care about. A Notifications list in the app keeps you current on all the boats you follow. You can message boat to boat or fleet-wide.

In short, If you have an MMSI and want to keep tabs on a fleet and a few friends, you can do that today for free with no new servers, gateways, backbones, databases, or plug-ins. Log on, claim your MMSI, and you are in. Existing Saillogger users are already part of the AISFleet.com network. If you want to create a fleet for a yacht club, rally, seasonal buddy-boat group, and so on, you will need a Saillogger account to manage it.

This does NOT address weather aggregation or remote monitoring, but it’s a first step in getting boaters more connected and the forthcoming native app (in beta) supports AIS relay for vessels that have AIS on their LAN/wifi. Enabling AISFleet users to become relays for their local AIS traffic without new hardware or the geek squad!

I have no financial interest or ownership in Saillogger.com or AISFleet.com.

Carl

MV Ellipsis

Selene 5906 (we just celebrated our 20-year anniversary with our Selene)

Thanks Carl

I started using AISFleet and it works great. As soon as I claimed my MMSI on the website the Selene West Coast Fleet showed up and I could see 97 Selenes at that time. I just pined the bookmark on my home screen and I can find everyone much faster than the old Selene map. I love that there is no subscription to use it and no ads that I have seen (yet).

Greg

M/V Moonstruck

Selene 4721