What are your perceptions / thoughts about signalk?

[Sandy]

Yes it could be considered a design but if it was a design fault more that just the one user would be making the same error and it was only this one.

It was simply this user was not paying attention to what they were doing when printing their work.

I am a designer not a clairvoyant

An interesting viewpoint.

Always worth applying Sod's Law to anything, especially software design. I spent the last part of my working life on safety critical stuff. You will be amazed what we stopped being released to the user and how few users speak up when there is an issue; in my experience those were the people I needed to talk to. I could then feed back to the design team and the coders. One of the few advantages of Agile software development.

Spent an interesting afternoon watching some of the 'Aircraft Interview' YouTube channel where a crusty old pilot was quite scathing of some of the functionality that had been released. To paraphrase, 'worked well in an office but not the cockpit'.

 

[ylop]

When I was working it saw the issue more as techy people not understanding what the non-technically inclined people wanted or needed.

I think both can be true.

Yes it could be considered a design but if it was a design fault more that just the one user would be making the same error and it was only this one.

Only one was telling you about it!

 

[rogerthebodger]

When I was working it saw the issue more as techy people not understanding what the non-technically inclined people wanted or needed.

I think both can be true.

Yess it all depends on the interaction the designer has with the end user. In some cases it can be quite close in others its the customer who may not be the end user just the supplier

To me constructive feedback is vital and welcome

Only one was telling you about it!

Yes only one so my view is that she as the only one who would print the work after producing it.

The other possibility is they she did not pay attention to what she was doing most of the time

I also added a confirm to delete message where she had to type in a Y to confirm She wanted me to put a default Y so all she would do is press enter. I refused

 

[dgadee]

I am a designer not a clairvoyant

Surely that's what a designer is? You need to imagine how the user will use your design.

 

[rogerthebodger]

Surely that's what a designer is? You need to imagine how the user will use your design.

Unfortunately reading users mines is very difficult to make designs fool proof as fools are so inventive in finding ways to misuse equipment.

All you can do is try to imagine how users can stuff up the systems and you get better with experience but sometimes you just cannot comprehend how users can also be imaginative in mis using systems

 

[dgadee]

I remember this from my IT period.

 

[rogerthebodger]

View attachment 171923
I remember this from my IT period.

Yes we had several cartoons like that in our development drawing office

 

[GHA]

I've installed signalk on a pi on my boat. The basics are relatively simple but to do anything remotely complicated requires a ton of research and forum trawling. There's a ton of potential in it though for a DIY hobbyist.

I'm still in the early stages but my goals are many:
- anchor alarm for on the boat and away from it
- engine/exhaust temp monitoring
- nmea2000 GPS to nmea0183 for my older VHFs DSC function
- publish our location to noforeignland
- bilge sensors in various areas so I know where to look in case of sudden water ingress. I've seen too many stories of people only noticing when the water level is above the sole and then no idea where it came from
- fridge temp monitoring, so we know when to defrost
- wind/pressure history to better decide when to reef
- wind/direction/speed/heel/rudder angle history to get a better understanding of our sailing performance
- diesel tank/rpm/speed monitoring to get a better understanding of fuel efficiency

The hardest part of a lot of this is getting the sensors figured out, but once that is sorted the big win is that signalk probably already has a plugin to receive the data and now you have all the information in one place and a bunch of potential tools to crunch the numbers, display the data and trigger alarms etc.

Is it easy? No. Is it substantially cheaper and more flexible than commercial solutions? Hell yes

Well part of the original question was answered - how easy is it to use - not a mention of anyone asking "how do i do this" and no mention of the included help. Were you aware of OpenMarine SignalK signalk · Discussions & Slack
Usually very quickly someone will be along to show the way.
Openplotter is by far the image to use, was that what you installed?
Welcome to OpenPlotter’s documentation! — OpenPlotter 3 documentation

Most of your list is cheap & has apps ready to do all the work. You missed battery monitoring, a single wire from a smartshunt records everything. Measuring the fuel will likely be a bit more involved.
All the software install is taken care of by openplotter so it's known to play nicely together. It would be interesting to hear how you get on.

Plotting & viewing data opens a whole new world....

 

[dgadee]

Well part of the original question was answered - how easy is it to use - not a mention of anyone asking "how do i do this" and no mention of the included help. Were you aware of OpenMarine SignalK signalk · Discussions & Slack
Usually very quickly someone will be along to show the way.
Openplotter is by far the image to use, was that what you installed?
Welcome to OpenPlotter’s documentation! — OpenPlotter 3 documentation

Most of your list is cheap & has apps ready to do all the work. You missed battery monitoring, a single wire from a smartshunt records everything. Measuring the fuel will likely be a bit more involved.
All the software install is taken care of by openplotter so it's known to play nicely together. It would be interesting to hear how you get on.

Plotting & viewing data opens a whole new world....

I tried to get feedback on my problem via forums but I think some issues are too specific - particularly hardware/software intersection - and nothing useful came back. I was not able to find a decent intro to SignalK which explained just how it operated under the user interface. OpenMarine documentation provides a "do this, do this, do this ..." sequence but if there's a problem you don't really know where that problem lies. I realise this is the case with all software documentation, but it would have been useful to have something reasonably non technical (see 'sockets' mentioned above) which lets you begin to develop understanding.

I've just looked at the online discussions you have pointed to and they are pretty technical looking to me. Overall, though, I like OpenMarine and when it is working SignalK does provide an organised data interface.

 

[GHA]

I tried to get feedback on my problem via forums but I think some issues are too specific - particularly hardware/software intersection - and nothing useful came back. I was not able to find a decent intro to SignalK which explained just how it operated under the user interface. OpenMarine documentation provides a "do this, do this, do this ..." sequence but if there's a problem you don't really know where that problem lies. I realise this is the case with all software documentation, but it would have been useful to have something reasonably non technical (see 'sockets' mentioned above) which lets you begin to develop understanding.

I've just looked at the online discussions you have pointed to and they are pretty technical looking to me. Overall, though, I like OpenMarine and when it is working SignalK does provide an organised data interface.

Thnx.
OpenMarine
is the official openplotter forums
&
Slack
same for signalk. Ask anything on there, it's all opensource so no paid help line but usually things get sorted out quickly & the developers are always keen for any feedback or bugs which need fixing.
It can get pretty complex as openplotter/signalk can be a simple n2k/0183 in multiplexed out again or very complex, but these are the places to ask *anything* . Maybe that's part of the inertia against what is just a computer, "too clever for me to go and just ask how do i turn it on"..
Some help over on facebook but not the best. Don't even bother posting a question on here.

This might help a little but quickly goes into the tech side of things which "normal" users don't need to know anything about.
https://signalk.org/specification/1.0.4/doc/signalk.pdf

What were you trying to do?

In very basic terms signalk receives data on pretty much any format you can dream up, it all gets turned into signalk language and sent out again. All NEA0183 gets sent straight back out again (unless you want to filter it) . Get more complex it can do anything with that data.
For instance if my AIS receiver is turned on the Pi3 works out how far away from the boat gps the target is and graphs it. Which is getting a bit geeky as it involves node-red but the user can cut & paste that so no need to program anything.
Nothing much around today but can leap up to hundreds of miles when tropospheric ducting is happening. And very useful to see that your receiver is still getting a good signal. Actually that's such a bonus on a full time cruising boat, graph everything to check how the batteries are doing, what the wind & direction did last night.

But if anyone wants a go, go have a play, ask if you get stuck.

 

[laika]

3 pages in is probably a little late to ask…what is this question about? The original post seemed to imply the signal k message format and a server (last I looked there were two open source servers by the signal k devs and the commercial digital yacht ikommunicate). But now we're talking about openplotter which is a collection of software which most people use primarily as a way to run opencpn and also includes one of the free signal k servers. And I could be wrong but isn't the graph plotting done by grafana (another open source program bundled with openplotter)?

is the *actual* question here "what are your perceptions of free / open source / DIY sailing software (Particularly openplotter)?"

 

[GHA]

3 pages in is probably a little late to ask…what is this question about? The original post seemed to imply the signal k message format and a server (last I looked there were two open source servers by the signal k devs and the commercial digital yacht ikommunicate). But now we're talking about openplotter which is a collection of software which most people use primarily as a way to run opencpn and also includes one of the free signal k servers. And I could be wrong but isn't the graph plotting done by grafana (another open source program bundled with openplotter)?

is the *actual* question here "what are your perceptions of free / open source / DIY sailing software (Particularly openplotter)?"

Pretty much as per the original question, which has been answered albeit implicitly. Seems for most it's some bedroom geeky stuff they don't need but don't actually know what it is or what it can do. But need to be a programmer & electronics nerd to do it. Which is very wrong & a pity as it puts people off having a look.
Signalk/openplotter/opencpn are very much joined at the hip, signalk & opencpn are slowly starting to talk to each other much more in some plugins. Openplotter sticks it all together.

IMHO if it's a raspberry pi then openplotter is by far the best game in town. As close to plug n play as you'll get in an operating system image.
If you want to do anything at all with data on a boat then nothing out there comes close to signalk.
Not sure there is anything else worth looking at really.

Nothing really to be gained to view any of the tools used in isolation either, influxdb is the time based database & grafana or chronograf to make the pretty graphs. Very common route to storing & viewing data, same as a multitude of IOT.
All these programs are in constant development & signalk looking at upping the UI game a bit, so what the general vibe is out in the wild is of interest. This particular forum probably as opinionated & naïve to what can be done with some free software as there is so no great surprises really but worth an ask, things could be improved if the documentation was better (though openplotter does a fine example for opensource). And no one asks "how do you do this".
Node is the only version of signalk used now, java version looks to have been archived in 2020.

Don't think there's anything anyone could realistically want to do with data on a boat which can`t be done by signalk.

 

[lustyd]

Seems for most it's some bedroom geeky stuff they don't need but don't actually know what it is or what it can do. But need to be a programmer & electronics nerd to do it. Which is very wrong & a pity as it puts people off having a look.

I don’t think it’s fair to say that’s wrong. If nobody can explain why it’s needed or what benefit it provides then by definition it’s a geeky hobby project. That’s fine but mainstream sailors want to go sailing with minimal fuss and quite a few on this forum don’t even like plotters, AIS etc. so telling them they ought to have a server to produce graphs they have no need of is going to be a hard sell at best.

 

[dgadee]

I don’t think it’s fair to say that’s wrong. If nobody can explain why it’s needed or what benefit it provides then by definition it’s a geeky hobby project. That’s fine but mainstream sailors want to go sailing with minimal fuss and quite a few on this forum don’t even like plotters, AIS etc. so telling them they ought to have a server to produce graphs they have no need of is going to be a hard sell at best.

But I just want to sail and SignalK seems to tie OpenPlotter, PyPilot, AIS reception and OpenCPN together nicely. I also don't want to spend large amounts of money on commercial chart plotters. Too tight.

 

[mjcoon]

Yes we had several cartoons like that in our development drawing office

Ah, as in that old rape story: "Nut screws washer and bolts"...

 

[laika]

But I just want to sail and SignalK seems to tie OpenPlotter, PyPilot, AIS reception and OpenCPN together nicely. I also don't want to spend large amounts of money on commercial chart plotters. Too tight.

Openplotter tied everything together before SignalK. SignalK is a non-essential stage between transducers and OpenCPN or pypilot. It's main value seems to be (a) for software developers writing in languages which come supplied with a json parser who don't want to load / write an nmea parser (note, for opencpn and pypilot they now support both with no additional functionality from the latter that I'm aware of) and (b) hobbyists doing weird things with bits of electronics where it may be easier to define the json than encode results in an XDR or "Proprietary" NMEA sentence

Neither of those are of any interest to the average sailing "user" of software. SignalK or lack thereof is irrelevant to people who just want to use those applications.

Signalk/openplotter/opencpn are very much joined at the hip, signalk & opencpn are slowly starting to talk to each other much more in some plugins.

Plenty of people (myself included) use opencpn on a laptop (no openplotter or signalK). I'm guessing though that outside of the ikommunicate which I will again guess (owners: correct me if I'm wrong) most people are mainly just using to multiplex between n2k and nmea-0183, almost no-one is running a SignalK server for any reason other than that it comes enabled by default in OpenPlotter and that 99% of people don't care that it's running or not so long as they can multiplex nmea and use opencpn and other apps which support nmea just fine.

"What's your perception of openplotter?" (/why is this fine free stuff not more widely used?) is still a good question
Does anyone other than GHA on this thread care whether their NMEA data is converted to signal k before being fed to their apps or not?

 

[GHA]

Openplotter tied everything together before SignalK. SignalK is a non-essential stage between transducers and OpenCPN or pypilot. It's main value seems to be (a) for software developers writing in languages which come supplied with a json parser who don't want to load / write an nmea parser

Not sure you know just how powerful signalk is, it will do anything you can dream up with apps for most popular kit there already. KIP dashboard I would miss so much. Compass calibration just works away in the background, huge list of plugins. If you really need to get deep down node red will do it.
But with a big bunch of istr over the years you've been against even just the idea. Which is the nature of both humans & the web but often it's the idea that is unpopular, not the actual.
Anyway, thread drift, the question was answered. Up to the individual what they want, if a Pi sounds appealing give it a go, openplotter makes it easy.

Or just go sailing.
(I'm a cruiser, it really would be very stupid not to have a Pi onboard doing so much useful stuff 24/7/52 with no real downside. )

"Does anyone other than GHA on this thread care whether their NMEA data is converted to signal k before being fed to their apps or not?" -- textbook leading question you naughty boy

 

[laika]

istr over the years you've been against even just the idea.

Not the original idea (a free alternative to NMEA data coms which I was passionately in favour of), just the implementation which I see as a lost opportunity to make the original idea happen. I was engaged with the project early on but failed to effectively convey my point that what was great for javascript programmers might not address the needs of embedded C programmers that would need to be on board if we wanted to see completely "nmea-free" data stacks in marine electronics. That being said, even if SignalK had turned out exactly the way I would have liked I would concede that few sailors would care what was being used as long as the applications worked, and that is my point.

(just about) No-one cares whether NMEA data is converted to something else before being fed into opencpn. They just want openCPN to work
(just about) No-one would be using SignalK for anything if it it weren't used by default in openplotter. Sure, evangelise openplotter (it's a great package), highlight the stuff people could get for free, ask questions like this thread to see what might make it more useable and feed that back. But (and please, parties other than GHA and myself in this conversation, do step in: I'm only expressing an opinion and could be completely out of touch with everyone else) it's OpenPlotter you will be more effective in convincing unbelievers of the value of, not SignalK.

 

[lustyd]

Not sure you know just how powerful signalk is, it will do anything you can dream up

But that's what people have been trying to tell you. Their dreams have all been fulfilled already. It's not that they don't understand it, it's that it isn't needed. There are lots of things I don't need on board, and it's on you to explain why it would be needed, not on me to dream up use-cases for your pet project. I don't think anyone here has suggested it's not a powerful system, it's just not a solution to a problem people have on boats.
I see this all the time at work, people trying to push IoT when it's entirely unnecessary, then it was Blockchain, and now it's ChatGPT. All have their use-cases, but not as many as people seem to think, and most could be solved in easier, cheaper and better ways.
SignalK requires a server, so you've already upped the power budget by half an amp without adding any value at all. That's 12Ah every day that I now have to generate that I otherwise wouldn't need. The IP network uses orders of magnitude more power than NMEA (which is still needed anyway since all the instruments on the market use it), both at the server, the client, and the switching/routing. Worse if you use Wifi.

Now tell me again - what value does this add over and above what's already there? I understand you think it's cool, but not once have you referred to anything of value.

 

[dgadee]

I used OpenCPN on its own but very difficult to keep updated I found. OpenPlotter sorts that out. PyPilot is easier to set up under OpenPlotter. Those are my reasons for moving. Happy enough.