Fwd: Adding ePaper navigation data to a sailboat - Hack a Day

[Jerry Isdale]

This one is for Brian Thomas who has been asking about such a project for quite a while

http://hackaday.com/2012/09/07/adding-epaper-navigation-data-to-a-sailboat/

[Mike Holden] has been on the hunt for a display that is easy to read in bright sunlight. He wants to use it to read out navigational data on his sail boat. The best option is an ePaper display. He managed to build a system that will feed updating NMEA 0183 data to a Nook Simple Touch.

NMEA 0183 is a protocol that governs data from marine navigational equipment. The most obvious is GPS, but there are a lot of possibilities like sonar, a gyrocompass, and an autopilot. To get things rolling he wrote an Arduino sketch which generates dummy packets using the standard. This let him develop and test the system without being near any of the real equipment. The heart of the build is a WiFi router. It pulls in the data over a USB port using an RS232 to USB converter cable. A Python script parses the data and generates a webpage which refreshes the data every second. This is loaded using Opera browser on the Nook

Follow the link for pics, video and links to more information.

Jerry Isdale

isd...@spacegambit.org

USA Program Lead, SpaceGAMBIT

Global Alliance of Makers Building Interstellar Technology

http://SpaceGAMBIT.org

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[Brian Thomas]

Sweet!  For the record, I got it to work and used it on the boat at this past Sat. race.  This guy goes deeper by using NMEA data which opens up the all the marine instruments to be displayed on a Nook Simple Touch which, is pretty huge and we can add marine electronics as another industry that is being challenged by hackers and open source as they have been overpriced and proprietary for too long.

I rooted a Nook ST, used SQLeditor app to change settings to allow mock locations, installed Tether GPS on both client/server side then used my HTC Evo with hotpost (not sprint data but local)/wifi to feed data to Simple Sailor app on the Nook.  Works killer.  Nooks are going for $99 now and the same data (speed and compass bearing) displays costs over $600.