Nerds of YBW

R

rumham

New Member
Joined
15 Sep 2025
Messages
6
Visit site
I've been playing with microcontrollers/sensors and thinking about their application while sailing, specifically around recording metrics like wave height, roll/pitch, GPS and recording passages - what is the nerdiest thing you've accomplished related to sailing?
 
Probably extracting ice front data plotted by ship's officers using a Mercator chart relabelled at half the latitude scale. Hint - Mercator is extremely non-linear, especially in the polar regions, so this procedure doesn't work; the resulting plot is not on any normal map projection. It took some hard thinking and ingenuity to come up with a workable procedure.
 
using a 9DOF 2euro chip on a custom board and a teensy 3.6 to measure pitch and roll and via signalK send them to my office server and store them in an influxDB
 
I suppose writing a routine for recording navigation and other data using an S100 bus single card computer with a Z80 processor counts? It was entirely written in Z80 assembler, as there was no operating system, and memory was a few kilobytes. My development system was an Osborne 1 with WordStar, ASM and link!
 
AngusMcDoon

Thread 'Anchor watcher YAPP - remote boat monitoring from a mobile phone'

A few weeks ago I posted a thread about the latest incarnation of an anchor watcher app and communications device. This app receives boat data from the instruments via my device over Bluetooth and compares their values against some pre-configured parameters and sounds an alarm if anything goes beyond the limits. Also included was an atmospheric pressure sensor. The data watched are depth (min and max), windspeed, pressure change, heading change, speed over ground and position change. The device has both NMEA2000 and NMEA0183 interfaces and is a user interface-less black box that redirects...
  • Like

GitHub - miniwinwm/BlueBridge: Sharing boat data across NMEA0183/NMEA2000/Bluetooth/IoT/MQTT with Android anchor watcher app and webpage.
 
When I was around 13 I wrote a program to teach my mother morse code so she could pass her Yachtmaster.

It was on a Commodore 64, had a picture of a ship with a light on it which flashed for the correct number of milliseconds (obviously it ran on the TV screen) ... simultaneously it produced a sound at the correct frequency and also with the correct timing.

It could be set to run only visual (light flashing but worked better in a darkened room) ... only audio, or both together. It had a data array of hundreds of words and sentences and would pick them at random to create mock tests, giving a result at the end of the test.

She loved it and passed her YM theory.
 
Just theoretical punk biotechnology so far, for example:-

De-watering deck core using halophyte/xerophyte seedlings such as Spartina maritima,, (or whatever they are calling it these days) and similar species.

Assessing FAME content of diesel via relative growth of a selected innoculum.

Just ideas, though, so probably dont count as actual achievement.
 
geem said:
My Raymarine autopilot does that anyway🤔
Click to expand...
sure it doesn't all of what I wrote in that one line post and neither does my Garmin. Your Raymarine may show heel, pitch, whatever on screen and that's possibly not coming from plotter but from depth transducer.
But anyway it wasn't what I typed.
So you'd also dismiss AntarcticPilot, AngusMcDoon and even Baggywrinkle nerdy achievements as well? I'm sure there are free apps for all that now :rolleyes:

I guess you'd probably say that me writing from scratch code to run hydraulic stabs on my boat was also pointless as I could just pay 60K and get new ones installed :)
 
I used 'Excel' to write a program that gave the metres of heave subjected to an ROV launch system on any DP vessel, from any launch position on any vessel. Relatively simple arithmetic, which ended any argument about whether it's too rough to dive, or not, by removing subjectivity.
I used'Excel' again to write a program where on any 'jack-up' oil rig, one would have to enter the rig heading & depth of water, press enter and be able to see the heading from leg to leg and the amount of umbilical needed to get there.
These aren't necessarily 'nerdy', but more as a result of being stuck on an installation with NOTHING else to do apart from watching 'Homes under the Hammer', or other brain emptying TV.
 
Last edited:
vas said:
So you'd also dismiss AntarcticPilot, AngusMcDoon and even Baggywrinkle nerdy achievements as well? I'm sure there are free apps for all that now :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Part of my nerdism project is a free Android app. Most of the rest is hardware bridging. An app can't do that.

In my early days of boaty geekery someone called my outboard engine rev and hour counter project pointless as it is possible to buy a ready made commercial equivalent. It was the start of the 'Yet Another Pointless Project' YAPP name, shamelessly taken from the Unix yacc utility.
 
Stemar said:
I wrote an Excel VBA program that used spherical trigonometry to give a distance and course from any lat/long to any other lat/long. It took me ages to get it working, then I got a GPS, so I probably used it in anger about twice
Click to expand...
But there's an excellent (and geodetically accurate to millimetres) utility to do that. Geod has been around for at least 30 years (Utility Programs)
 
lots of ESP32s on board, all feeding into signalK. An M5stack tough is my NMEA repeater. I have ESPs with ultrasonic transducers checking levels in both tanks. And with a hall sensor as a chain counter. Oh and doing GPS receiving duties when the plotter is off. I also have a pi with a TV stick sniffing weather station comms and feeding that into nodered to format it in a way signalk can make use of.
Using tailscale means everything is accessible from my phone, securely.
 
AngusMcDoon said:
Nerdy question incoming...

Haversine formula or Vincenty algorithm?
Click to expand...
Never heard of them - I did it the hard way, from first principles, but I was playing, so the time didn't matter. Since I retired, I don't think I've used VBA more than a couple of times, and the last one, I really struggled with, even though it should have been simple.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

Top