Using a raspberry Pi for boaty applications - anyone done anything similar?

[pragmatist]

I believe RPI supports HDMI. Search on Alibaba for 'TFT HDMI' and you get some potential items.

http://https://www.modmypi.com do some screens - some HDMI, others using ribbon cable. Not cheap - but maybe Alibaba are cheaper if you're prepared to wait on delivery - apparently it's Chinese New Year hols at the moment

 

[maby]

I went with a Pi Zero as it has a lower power consumption than the full Pi but power supply could still make or break the project, as you say maby. I was wandering whether a solar panel could bridge any gap.

A great deal will depend on how long the boat can be left unattended. A continuous half amp drain could seriously damage a 200Ah battery bank in less than 2 weeks with shore power gone and even if you get it down to 100mA, several weeks could be taking a big bite out of your battery. In our case, someone had tripped out the pontoon power pod that we were connected to - so the rest of the marina had power and nobody noticed that we were disconnected.

The Pi does not have any good support for high levels of power saving - it is on or it is off. That is why we switched to Atmel AVR processors - they have a built-in watchdog timer which can be configured to control an ultra-low power mode - the watchdog draws a few micro-amps which allows me to turn the entire main processor off - it just kicks into action every couple of minutes to see if there is anything to do. If the mains power fails and the battery voltage drops too low, the system kicks into action every few minutes to see if the power has recovered - the effective current drain is little more than the microamps that the watchdog timer draws.

 

[vas]

I'm probably missing something, but why go for the Pi?

OK, I have a bananapi running rasbean (sp?) OS at home as an interface to the house BMS, that's fine, it's on the grid!
But for the sort of thing you're after, HDMI and possibly SATA which are killing features of the pi are of no use whatsoever.
I guess any old arduino with a GSM shield would do what you want, straight analogue inputs with a voltage divider to drop it down to 0-5V and you're running.
Lots of code to nick from all over, good fun!

IMHO a pi is an overkill (not only powerwise)

cheers

V.

 

[maby]

I'm probably missing something, but why go for the Pi?

OK, I have a bananapi running rasbean (sp?) OS at home as an interface to the house BMS, that's fine, it's on the grid!
But for the sort of thing you're after, HDMI and possibly SATA which are killing features of the pi are of no use whatsoever.
I guess any old arduino with a GSM shield would do what you want, straight analogue inputs with a voltage divider to drop it down to 0-5V and you're running.
Lots of code to nick from all over, good fun!

IMHO a pi is an overkill (not only powerwise)

cheers

V.

That is effectively what I've done - Arduinos are based on the Atmel AVR processors and I did use Arduinos for the early prototypes. But even an Arduino has relatively high power consumption because it carries around a lot of interfaces that you don't need in the context of a boat monitor.

The Pi is also a lot easier to work with if you are not an experienced programmer - for a start, it does have an operating system. Things like Arduinos and PICs really are working right down at the bits and bytes level.

 

[julians]

I didnt choose the pi because it was especially suited to this particular application, it was more that I wanted to have a play with a raspberry pi and see what I could do with one, and this (boat monitoring) is the first area of functionality that came to mind that I would find useful.


A secondary consideration was that if I decided to expand the usage to other tasks (more complex integration with other devices on the boat over NMEA etc etc) then the pi should be able to handle almost anything I could throw at it including easy connectivity to wifi, output to screens etc.

I do agree it is massive overkill for simple monitoring, but its a very extendable piece of hardware, with quite a decent amount of processing oomph for the money.

 

[Hurricane]

I didnt choose the pi because it was especially suited to this particular application, it was more that I wanted to have a play with a raspberry pi and see what I could do with one, and this (boat monitoring) is the first area of functionality that came to mind that I would find useful.


A secondary consideration was that if I decided to expand the usage to other tasks (more complex integration with other devices on the boat over NMEA etc etc) then the pi should be able to handle almost anything I could throw at it including easy connectivity to wifi, output to screens etc.

I do agree it is massive overkill for simple monitoring, but its a very extendable piece of hardware, with quite a decent amount of processing oomph for the money.

And cheap