Openplotter Moitessier Hat

I'm a big fan of a Raspberry Pi onboard, but not bought one of the hats

I have a Pi running Openplotter, connected to a Quark AIS receiver and my Garmin plotter.
For £100 for the Pi & Quark AIS, it adds AIS to the plotter and streams wireless GPS / AIS data to my iPhone and iPad.
I use Memory Map on both Apple devices and it works a treat

Remain a little unsure of the Montessier hat, the onboard compass is likely affected by the surrounding electric equipment and i'm not sure what I would do with heel and pitch sensors other than idle curiosity?

Cheers
 
paulg567 said:
I'm a big fan of a Raspberry Pi onboard, but not bought one of the hats

I have a Pi running Openplotter, connected to a Quark AIS receiver and my Garmin plotter.
For £100 for the Pi & Quark AIS, it adds AIS to the plotter and streams wireless GPS / AIS data to my iPhone and iPad.
I use Memory Map on both Apple devices and it works a treat

Remain a little unsure of the Montessier hat, the onboard compass is likely affected by the surrounding electric equipment and i'm not sure what I would do with heel and pitch sensors other than idle curiosity?

Cheers
Click to expand...

Yay! Another Openplotter/Pi fan. Thought I was the only one. :cool:

I've engine temperature data , barometer and battery voltage going into openplotter as well - works just great .
Apparently the compass board has auto config routines built in so it will keep itself accurate even on a steel boat. Not tried it though.. Heel & pitch come from the same sensor o are there if you want them.

Next step for me is making an autopilot from an old autohelm motor kindly left at the shower block the other day.

Openplotter must be way ahead of anything else available as an onboard nav/boat monitoring computer.
 
paulg567 said:
I'm a big fan of a Raspberry Pi onboard, but not bought one of the hats

I have a Pi running Openplotter, connected to a Quark AIS receiver and my Garmin plotter.
For £100 for the Pi & Quark AIS, it adds AIS to the plotter and streams wireless GPS / AIS data to my iPhone and iPad.
I use Memory Map on both Apple devices and it works a treat

Remain a little unsure of the Montessier hat, the onboard compass is likely affected by the surrounding electric equipment and i'm not sure what I would do with heel and pitch sensors other than idle curiosity?

Cheers
Click to expand...

I agree with you mostly. I'm looking at setting up a similar system - wifi enabled ais reciever + opencpn on a tablet + nmea connection to an old garmin chart plotter.

I do have a pi but prefer the (cheaper) standalone waterproof ais system made by Quark as it seems more robust overall plus you can get one with Nmea0183 multiplexer capability which is useful. The principle advantage of the moitessier hat seems to be diect integration with the Pi and the higher sensitivity ais reciever although I'm not sure what practical difference this makes.

I'd like to get the Pi setup as a proper onboard computer on a 27footer but I'm waiting for the right screen to come along. I'm not so fussed about having all the boat systems wired up and monitored, but would rather get a robust navigation system with some degree of redundancy for singlehanding.

I'm sure the moitessier hat is a very good bit of kit, I'm just not sure it ticks all the boxes. Perhaps if the pi+hat bespoke case the openplotter folks sell was ip67 rated it'd be a different story
 
fifer said:
I'd like to get the Pi setup as a proper onboard computer on a 27footer but I'm waiting for the right screen to come along. I'm not so fussed about having all the boat systems wired up and monitored, but would rather get a robust navigation system with some degree of redundancy for singlehanding.
Click to expand...

You could make a start now if you wanted fitting it headless. I've a samsung 19" monitor running direct off the boat batteries but rarely use it - more often VNC over wifi into the Pi on a tablet or laptop. Though if you're constantly fiddling and changing things a monitor might come in handy now and again if you manage to break the Pi wifi access point otherwise it's very stable.

For monitoring liveaboard logging the battery voltage is really handy, and having engine temperature is very nice , costs next to nothing for a few sensors and and hour or 3 to wire. Menus in openplotter make the setup easy.

Onboard my bot the Pi really is central control, splashed out on a hifiberry amp board so the Pi is music centre, podcasts or live radio over wifi. Control from tablet or any web device.

For nav a tablet in the cockpit running opencpn works just great, opencpn does such a good job of AIS display. Then you can do all the passage planning on a laptop and copy across the files to openplotter and the tablet. Also the logbook plugin works well, very little paper any more. Auto logs position, cog, sog, pressure & various other bits if the nmea is there. Very :cool, very cheap such a powerful and adaptable system and very low power! What's not to love :)
 
When I read things like this I think: Wow - how do I make one of these?

Then I realise the boat is safe haven from such devilish devices.

So: does this Moitessier HAT replace the Pi and what sort of low power consumption monitor is best (or is an old Samsung galaxy tab via WiFi the way forward?)...
 
langstonelayabout said:
When I read things like this I think: Wow - how do I make one of these?

Then I realise the boat is safe haven from such devilish devices.

So: does this Moitessier HAT replace the Pi and what sort of low power consumption monitor is best (or is an old Samsung galaxy tab via WiFi the way forward?)...
Click to expand...

The moitessier hat just plugs into the Pi. It has gps,compass, high quality AIS reciever and barometer built in which it sends to the Openplotter software on the Pi.
I use a 19" monitor down below, well occasionally. It draws about an amp. Android tablet (so you can get opencpn running on it) works well. You can mirror the Pi desktop on a tablet as well but it's a bit clunky compared to the app.
 
fifer said:
What monitor do you use out of interest. Going headless with a tablet is pretty clunky!
Click to expand...

It's a samsung 19" A300, VGA so had to get an adapter. Might not be ,made anymore.

It's opencpn over vnc that's a bit clunky compared to the app, a 10" tablet will let you get into openplotter not too bad, though obviously a decent monitor is much better. Give it a go, download the latest openplotter, copy onto an sd card and put the card into the pi. Turn on and make lots of cups of tea :) Takes ages to load. Then openplotter will reboot itself and create an access point called openplotter, password 12345678. Then you can view it with android VNC viewer, user Pi, password raspberry.
 
Not sure about you guys, but I feel opencpn isn't a great piece of software and is rather slow and clunky on a Pi and Im not a massive fan of the UK charts

I run a Pi headless and you can connect to it easily through VNC

There are better chart software packages that run nicely on your iPhone or iPad and use the data streamed from Openplotter. I have a small Garmin chartplotter in the cockpit mainly for daylight readability. Memory-map works a treat though on the iPad and shows AIS target much more clearly. Works a treat!

Can be a little bit of faff to setup, but the functionality makes the expensive chart plotters look rather silly

Cheers
 
paulg567 said:
Not sure about you guys, but I feel opencpn isn't a great piece of software and is rather slow and clunky on a Pi and Im not a massive fan of the UK charts

I run a Pi headless and you can connect to it easily through VNC
Click to expand...

It will be much slower VNC. Android version works well but apple architecture make it impossible to port over.

As a piece of nav software Opencpn must be up there with commercial offerings costing many hundreds,very powerful with a multitude of plugins. And being opensource any bugs get sorted straight away. Creating google earth image charts in a few seconds is also a big plus.


What is it about the Ocharts you don't like? I bought Spain and they looked like any other vector offerings only up to date.
 
Yes, VNC is slow. I use the charts installed directly on the iPad / iPhone and use the Pi data for position & AIS.
The Pi is good for trend graphing, and Node-red can be easily used to plot pressure/wind/temperature over a 24 hr period. Again visible on all devices.
If you plug your phone into it, you can even share the 4G data across all devices.

I found Open CPN a little slow for me, but charts are very much a personal choice and my go-to is memory map.

The Pi isn't perfect and does take some effort to set it up, but it will give you most of the functionality of a high end plotter for a fraction of the price.
 
paulg567 said:
Yes, VNC is slow. I use the charts installed directly on the iPad / iPhone and use the Pi data for position & AIS.
The Pi is good for trend graphing, and Node-red can be easily used to plot pressure/wind/temperature over a 24 hr period. Again visible on all devices.
If you plug your phone into it, you can even share the 4G data across all devices.

I found Open CPN a little slow for me, but charts are very much a personal choice and my go-to is memory map.

The Pi isn't perfect and does take some effort to set it up, but it will give you most of the functionality of a high end plotter for a fraction of the price.
Click to expand...

Don't forget the excellent SignalK :)

Not sure about effort to set up though? Copy onto a sd card, put it in the Pi and turn on then wait a while. Plug in a serial/usb and a couple of mouse clicks to point to the USB and off you go :)

Thermometers , voltmeter & barometer for this data cost maybe 15 quid? And yes. node red is great, I record everything into a data base. SignalK has node-red app now which makes getting at the data even easier. :cool:

Gonna be another warm one today... :)

rooxnii.png
 
Last edited:
Big_Col said:
Hey guys, does anyone have NMEA 0183 data being received by their Pi/Opnplotter ??

I'm not convinced on the hardware required to achieve this..

Cheers
Colin
Click to expand...
This website describes connecting NMEA 0183 to Pi. It does a lot of other things too but (from a quick glance) it seems to be a detailed description.
 
cpedw said:
This website describes connecting NMEA 0183 to Pi. It does a lot of other things too but (from a quick glance) it seems to be a detailed description.
Click to expand...

"Detailed description"? I sighed when I saw another dead thread revival but it was worth it for that link. That's the best "boat computer project" write-up I've seen. Thanks for posting it.
 
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