Looking to build a WeatherStation for my sailboat

I finally got my sailboat! A long-term dream of mine, a bucket list item! I bought her last week and I leave Thursday with my mate Speedy, to sail her down from CT to NC. I will rename her SV Slosh outta Oriental, NC. WOOT! WOOT! WOOT!

Here are the rest of the pics: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3p9xc4q4ltydhjg/AABes9TP5uIXgs0Frto9d67Oa?dl=0.

In thinking about her capabilities, on the water, I will always be curious about the weather. Tim, your WeatherStation sprung immediately to mind. I found several websites, I am perusing, but I am a little lost on which hardware to get and bringing her up. [1][2][3]. Am I supposed to buy the OurWeather device?

The plot and rotary dial displays are AWESOME! I'd love to have a rotary dial for both the barometer, as you have shown, as well as the anemometer. Perhaps on a waterproof display at the helm...that would be good.

This would be perfect for my Yawl, especially the anemometer and barometer measurements. I have 12v DC power.

TIm, would you guide me to getting it setup? I would greatly appreciate your mentoring me a little. For this trip I have until Thursday, to make it happen, so it is a bit of a rush to accomplish this.

[1] WeatherStation - https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6573
[2] Weather Station at SqueakSource - http://www.squeaksource.com/WeatherStation.html
[3] OurWeather - https://shop.switchdoc.com/products/ourweather-complete-weather-kit

> On 2020-09-27, at 6:38 AM, Robert Withers <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> I finally got my sailboat! A long-term dream of mine, a bucket list item! I bought her last week and I leave Thursday with my mate Speedy, to sail her down from CT to NC. I will rename her SV Slosh outta Oriental, NC. WOOT! WOOT! WOOT!

Congratulations on getting your very own money slurping hole in the water :-)


> In thinking about her capabilities, on the water, I will always be curious about the weather.

I understand knowing about the weather is quite important on a boat. Something about 100ft waves etc?

> Tim, your WeatherStation sprung immediately to mind. I found several websites, I am perusing, but I am a little lost on which hardware to get and bringing her up. [1][2][3]. Am I supposed to buy the OurWeather device?

I'd be very surprised if the very basic stuff I bought would survive more than a few weeks at sea, it simply isn't that sort of quality. I can't imagine the lightweight plastic cup anemometer surviving the first heavy gust of wind!

So, that definitely means some research into what gear you can find that is suitably tough. I imagine it will not be cheap because nothing about a boat is cheap.

>
> The plot and rotary dial displays are AWESOME! I'd love to have a rotary dial for both the barometer, as you have shown, as well as the anemometer. Perhaps on a waterproof display at the helm...that would be good.
>

If you want to use any of the stuff I wrote you'll need to find some sensor hardware that has some variety of output that could be handled by a Pi or similar SBC - maybe even something like an ESP-32 board would be smart here. The cheap stuff simply uses a magnetic reed switch on the anemometer (grief, that's hard to type) and so you get to count pulses and have all the fun of sorting out de-bouncing etc. The wind direction vane does some sort of cockamamie resistor network and magentic reed switches that require an ADC and some rather hope-and-guess maths to work out where it is pointing - and only 8 options, so not very useful on a boat.

I'm told that all the smart people are using ultrasonic based sensors that use differential signal propagation to work out both the wind speed and direction with no moving parts. And apparently, can work out the rain density from the impacts of raindrops on the flat plate sensor. Cool stuff. The nearest I've seen to the mil-spec system a friend is working on is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weatherflow/tempest-a-revolutionary-personal-weather-system?ref=discovery_category_newest&term=weather

This is all going to take some research with your boating contacts to find a good system. The downside is that any commercial system will almost certainly have its own display suff. You could do much worse than looking at https://microship.com and contacting Steve; he has done this sort of thing for many years and may have parts to point to or even sell.

Once you've got sensors that can talk to an ESP or a Pi (so various digital connections or i2c or spi or even bluetooth?) you can consider getting the data to some other machine to display. It may be that your sensors can connect directly to that display machine, saving one step. For a home built display you might go with a Pi attached to their 7" multi-touch display inside a very well sealed box.

I'm afraid this may take longer than 'by Thursday' :-)


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful Latin Phrases:- Tam exanimis quam tunica nehru fio. = I am as dead as the nehru jacket.

Hi tim,

On 2020-09-27, at 6:38 AM, Robert Withers [hidden email] wrote:

I finally got my sailboat! A long-term dream of mine, a bucket list item! I bought her last week and I leave Thursday with my mate Speedy, to sail her down from CT to NC. I will rename her SV Slosh outta Oriental, NC. WOOT! WOOT! WOOT!

Congratulations on getting your very own money slurping hole in the water :-)

Yes, I totally underestimated the upfront costs. So I will distribute my fiscal load, month over month. Yes, I am retired! Me and my dog are heading to open water! She is going to love live-aboard, I think!

---

I will approach my 1972 boat in the same fashion I approached my truck. I bought a 1997 Pathfinder, the key feature being a manual transmission. This turns out to be fairly rare in trucks, most are sold with only an automatic transmission, these days. What a horrible outcome! I like changing my own gears, thank you very much. The truck being a '97, there were certain maintenance issues. As well I had some upgrades I wanted (tow hitch!). My approach was to generate 3 lists: maintenance list, upgrade list, exploratory list.

Doing the same with my boat, I will add weather instrumentation to my upgrade list and to my exploratory list. My upgrade list already has such items as gimbaled 3-burner/oven boat stove, air conditioner, 15 W A/C generator, 12v refrigerator, battery recharger and now includes a distributed Weather Station. It will take time, but I will get there. I am just watching my money to ensure my emergency funds and maintenance are well covered.

My monthly costs for the boat are $100/mo boat insurance and $265/mo live-aboard slip fees. Yearly costs are haul, bottom paint and zincs (~$2,000/year). My upgrade list is pricey!

In thinking about her capabilities, on the water, I will always be curious about the weather.

I understand knowing about the weather is quite important on a boat. Something about 100ft waves etc?

Yes, especially if I follow through on my plan to sail to Morocco in 2022. Big Atlantic swell!

Tim, your WeatherStation sprung immediately to mind. I found several websites, I am perusing, but I am a little lost on which hardware to get and bringing her up. [1][2][3]. Am I supposed to buy the OurWeather device?

I'd be very surprised if the very basic stuff I bought would survive more than a few weeks at sea, it simply isn't that sort of quality. I can't imagine the lightweight plastic cup anemometer surviving the first heavy gust of wind!

So, that definitely means some research into what gear you can find that is suitably tough. I imagine it will not be cheap because nothing about a boat is cheap.

Yes and so the weather sensing lands on my exploratory list! Not too much is cheap. NC slips are cheaper than so and so...

The plot and rotary dial displays are AWESOME! I'd love to have a rotary dial for both the barometer, as you have shown, as well as the anemometer. Perhaps on a waterproof display at the helm...that would be good.

If you want to use any of the stuff I wrote you'll need to find some sensor hardware that has some variety of output that could be handled by a Pi or similar SBC - maybe even something like an ESP-32 board would be smart here. The cheap stuff simply uses a magnetic reed switch on the anemometer (grief, that's hard to type) and so you get to count pulses and have all the fun of sorting out de-bouncing etc. The wind direction vane does some sort of cockamamie resistor network and magentic reed switches that require an ADC and some rather hope-and-guess maths to work out where it is pointing - and only 8 options, so not very useful on a boat.

My boat may already have various meteorological sensors, that I would just need to figure out how to interface with. I will fidn out more this Thursday. From reading your WeatherStation page and other sources, it is sounding like the data collection issue is two-fold: A) communications interface and B) data format.

I'm told that all the smart people are using ultrasonic based sensors that use differential signal propagation to work out both the wind speed and direction with no moving parts. And apparently, can work out the rain density from the impacts of raindrops on the flat plate sensor. Cool stuff. The nearest I've seen to the mil-spec system a friend is working on is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weatherflow/tempest-a-revolutionary-personal-weather-system?ref=discovery_category_newest&term=weather

Alright, this is quite cool. I dug a bit deeper and found a site to buy the Tempest device: https://shop.weatherflow.com/collections/frontpage/products/tempest. This only sells the Tempest sensor device and a WiFi hub, no battery backup.

From the page you linked it describes an option:

Tempest - Storm & Fire Ready Kit

This includes: "with Pro Hub and battery backup. Includes mobile / cellular communication fail-over during WiFi outages. Battery backup provides power to the Hub for up to seven days. Includes a prepaid data plan for at least 750 hours of continuous data streaming during WiFi outages."

Perhaps there is some way to buy the Kickstarter package.

I also researched, briefly a weatherproof option for the RPi. I found this: https://www.crowdsupply.com/openh/rubicon. Stackable to include the hub and battery backup with the stackable option? Perhaps. If the sensor is Wifi/Bluetooth, then this Pi may be stored in the cabin. But the display,a at the helm, would need weatherproofing. My curiosity is a weatherproof touch display at the helm. On the exploratory list!

This is all going to take some research with your boating contacts to find a good system. The downside is that any commercial system will almost certainly have its own display suff. You could do much worse than looking at https://microship.com and contacting Steve; he has done this sort of thing for many years and may have parts to point to or even sell.

Alright, lots to explore! I will save his contact!

Once you've got sensors that can talk to an ESP or a Pi (so various digital connections or i2c or spi or even bluetooth?) you can consider getting the data to some other machine to display.

Yes, this sounds the right approach! I read, I think in the Tempest stuff, about a EU weather data standard.

 It may be that your sensors can connect directly to that display machine, saving one step. For a home built display you might go with a Pi attached to their 7" multi-touch display inside a very well sealed box.

Yes, though it would be fantastic to have the touch screen (12"?) available/accessible in the weather.

I'm afraid this may take longer than 'by Thursday' :-)

That is for sure! I am excited to dig into it, over time!

Thank you for your guidance, tim! I look forwards to learning more.

Kindly,
Robert

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful Latin Phrases:- Tam exanimis quam tunica nehru fio. = I am as dead as the nehru jacket.

On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 16:22, Robert Withers <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi tim,

On 9/27/20 2:07 PM, tim Rowledge wrote:

On 2020-09-27, at 6:38 AM, Robert Withers [hidden email] wrote:

I finally got my sailboat! A long-term dream of mine, a bucket list item! I bought her last week and I leave Thursday with my mate Speedy, to sail her down from CT to NC. I will rename her SV Slosh outta Oriental, NC. WOOT! WOOT! WOOT!

Congratulations on getting your very own money slurping hole in the water :-)

Yes, I totally underestimated the upfront costs. So I will distribute my fiscal load, month over month. Yes, I am retired! Me and my dog are heading to open water! She is going to love live-aboard, I think!

---

I will approach my 1972 boat in the same fashion I approached my truck. I bought a 1997 Pathfinder, the key feature being a manual transmission. This turns out to be fairly rare in trucks, most are sold with only an automatic transmission, these days. What a horrible outcome! I like changing my own gears, thank you very much. The truck being a '97, there were certain maintenance issues. As well I had some upgrades I wanted (tow hitch!). My approach was to generate 3 lists: maintenance list, upgrade list, exploratory list.

Doing the same with my boat, I will add weather instrumentation to my upgrade list and to my exploratory list. My upgrade list already has such items as gimbaled 3-burner/oven boat stove, air conditioner, 15 W A/C generator, 12v refrigerator, battery recharger and now includes a distributed Weather Station. It will take time, but I will get there. I am just watching my money to ensure my emergency funds and maintenance are well covered.

My monthly costs for the boat are $100/mo boat insurance and $265/mo live-aboard slip fees. Yearly costs are haul, bottom paint and zincs (~$2,000/year). My upgrade list is pricey!

In thinking about her capabilities, on the water, I will always be curious about the weather.

I understand knowing about the weather is quite important on a boat. Something about 100ft waves etc?

Yes, especially if I follow through on my plan to sail to Morocco in 2022. Big Atlantic swell!

Tim, your WeatherStation sprung immediately to mind. I found several websites, I am perusing, but I am a little lost on which hardware to get and bringing her up. [1][2][3]. Am I supposed to buy the OurWeather device?

I'd be very surprised if the very basic stuff I bought would survive more than a few weeks at sea, it simply isn't that sort of quality. I can't imagine the lightweight plastic cup anemometer surviving the first heavy gust of wind!

So, that definitely means some research into what gear you can find that is suitably tough. I imagine it will not be cheap because nothing about a boat is cheap.

Yes and so the weather sensing lands on my exploratory list! Not too much is cheap. NC slips are cheaper than so and so...

The plot and rotary dial displays are AWESOME! I'd love to have a rotary dial for both the barometer, as you have shown, as well as the anemometer. Perhaps on a waterproof display at the helm...that would be good.

If you want to use any of the stuff I wrote you'll need to find some sensor hardware that has some variety of output that could be handled by a Pi or similar SBC - maybe even something like an ESP-32 board would be smart here. The cheap stuff simply uses a magnetic reed switch on the anemometer (grief, that's hard to type) and so you get to count pulses and have all the fun of sorting out de-bouncing etc. The wind direction vane does some sort of cockamamie resistor network and magentic reed switches that require an ADC and some rather hope-and-guess maths to work out where it is pointing - and only 8 options, so not very useful on a boat.

My boat may already have various meteorological sensors, that I would just need to figure out how to interface with. I will fidn out more this Thursday. From reading your WeatherStation page and other sources, it is sounding like the data collection issue is two-fold: A) communications interface and B) data format.

I'm told that all the smart people are using ultrasonic based sensors that use differential signal propagation to work out both the wind speed and direction with no moving parts. And apparently, can work out the rain density from the impacts of raindrops on the flat plate sensor. Cool stuff. The nearest I've seen to the mil-spec system a friend is working on is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weatherflow/tempest-a-revolutionary-personal-weather-system?ref=discovery_category_newest&term=weather

Alright, this is quite cool. I dug a bit deeper and found a site to buy the Tempest device: https://shop.weatherflow.com/collections/frontpage/products/tempest. This only sells the Tempest sensor device and a WiFi hub, no battery backup.

From the page you linked it describes an option:

Tempest - Storm & Fire Ready Kit

This includes: "with Pro Hub and battery backup. Includes mobile / cellular communication fail-over during WiFi outages. Battery backup provides power to the Hub for up to seven days. Includes a prepaid data plan for at least 750 hours of continuous data streaming during WiFi outages."

Perhaps there is some way to buy the Kickstarter package.

I also researched, briefly a weatherproof option for the RPi. I found this: https://www.crowdsupply.com/openh/rubicon. Stackable to include the hub and battery backup with the stackable option? Perhaps. If the sensor is Wifi/Bluetooth, then this Pi may be stored in the cabin. But the display,a at the helm, would need weatherproofing. My curiosity is a weatherproof touch display at the helm. On the exploratory list!

This is all going to take some research with your boating contacts to find a good system. The downside is that any commercial system will almost certainly have its own display suff. You could do much worse than looking at https://microship.com and contacting Steve; he has done this sort of thing for many years and may have parts to point to or even sell.

Alright, lots to explore! I will save his contact!

Once you've got sensors that can talk to an ESP or a Pi (so various digital connections or i2c or spi or even bluetooth?) you can consider getting the data to some other machine to display.

Yes, this sounds the right approach! I read, I think in the Tempest stuff, about a EU weather data standard.

 It may be that your sensors can connect directly to that display machine, saving one step. For a home built display you might go with a Pi attached to their 7" multi-touch display inside a very well sealed box.

Yes, though it would be fantastic to have the touch screen (12"?) available/accessible in the weather.

I'm afraid this may take longer than 'by Thursday' :-)

That is for sure! I am excited to dig into it, over time!

Thank you for your guidance, tim! I look forwards to learning more.

Kindly,
Robert

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful Latin Phrases:- Tam exanimis quam tunica nehru fio. = I am as dead as the nehru jacket.

On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 14:23, Robert <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey Tim, check it! 

Re: recent discussions about multi-touch 12” displays. Lookie-Lookie what I have just learned comes with the sailboat I bought. It is the Zeus3S 7”? I guess 7” chart plotter, a $1,300 value with maps for entire east coast! Bam! We’re cooking now! Ready for my trans-Atlantic trip to Portugal by way of the Azores, a 2022. This chart plotter can handle it! Global. It is good to know where I am and what lay ahead!

https://www.bandg.com/en-gb/bg/type/chartplotter/bg-zeus3-7-mfdworld-basemap

So the obvious question is whether I can figure out how to boot Squeak on this chart plotter!!! Shizaam!

Honestly, with freely downloadable chart data, I was thinking of combining your weather station (w depth sounder) with a Squeak-based navigation chart plotter capability. Then I learned about my Zeus 3! :-D

Kindly,
Robert
. .. ... ‘...^,^

I am searching for the processor for the Zeus 3S 7" and cannot find anything more than the "high-performance quad-core processor". The so called "Glass Helm" device has a iMX 8 integrated six-core processor. I could find the tech specs. All the docs I see only state: "The Zeus³'s high-performance processor". *grumble*

K, r

Hey Tim, check it! 

Re: recent discussions about multi-touch 12” displays. Lookie-Lookie what I have just learned comes with the sailboat I bought. It is the Zeus3S 7”? I guess 7” chart plotter, a $1,300 value with maps for entire east coast! Bam! We’re cooking now! Ready for my trans-Atlantic trip to Portugal by way of the Azores, a 2022. This chart plotter can handle it! Global. It is good to know where I am and what lay ahead!

https://www.bandg.com/en-gb/bg/type/chartplotter/bg-zeus3-7-mfdworld-basemap

So the obvious question is whether I can figure out how to boot Squeak on this chart plotter!!! Shizaam!

Honestly, with freely downloadable chart data, I was thinking of combining your weather station (w depth sounder) with a Squeak-based navigation chart plotter capability. Then I learned about my Zeus 3! :-D

Kindly,
Robert
. .. ... ‘...^,^

I asked on StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64145054/what-processor-runs-the-bg-zeus-3s-chartplotter-and-can-we-get-into-the-boot-c

I am searching for the processor for the Zeus 3S 7" and cannot find anything more than the "high-performance quad-core processor". The so called "Glass Helm" device has a iMX 8 integrated six-core processor. I could find the tech specs. All the docs I see only state: "The Zeus³'s high-performance processor". *grumble*

K, r

On 9/30/20 2:23 PM, Robert wrote:

Hey Tim, check it! 

Re: recent discussions about multi-touch 12” displays. Lookie-Lookie what I have just learned comes with the sailboat I bought. It is the Zeus3S 7”? I guess 7” chart plotter, a $1,300 value with maps for entire east coast! Bam! We’re cooking now! Ready for my trans-Atlantic trip to Portugal by way of the Azores, a 2022. This chart plotter can handle it! Global. It is good to know where I am and what lay ahead!

https://www.bandg.com/en-gb/bg/type/chartplotter/bg-zeus3-7-mfdworld-basemap

So the obvious question is whether I can figure out how to boot Squeak on this chart plotter!!! Shizaam!

Honestly, with freely downloadable chart data, I was thinking of combining your weather station (w depth sounder) with a Squeak-based navigation chart plotter capability. Then I learned about my Zeus 3! :-D

Kindly,
Robert
. .. ... ‘...^,^

Removed the SPAM moniker...Jeez, what paranoia? F*cks hard with my PTSD.

I asked on StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64145054/what-processor-runs-the-bg-zeus-3s-chartplotter-and-can-we-get-into-the-boot-c

On 9/30/20 4:01 PM, Robert Withers wrote:

I am searching for the processor for the Zeus 3S 7" and cannot find anything more than the "high-performance quad-core processor". The so called "Glass Helm" device has a iMX 8 integrated six-core processor. I could find the tech specs. All the docs I see only state: "The Zeus³'s high-performance processor". *grumble*

K, r

On 9/30/20 2:23 PM, Robert wrote:

Hey Tim, check it! 

Re: recent discussions about multi-touch 12” displays. Lookie-Lookie what I have just learned comes with the sailboat I bought. It is the Zeus3S 7”? I guess 7” chart plotter, a $1,300 value with maps for entire east coast! Bam! We’re cooking now! Ready for my trans-Atlantic trip to Portugal by way of the Azores, a 2022. This chart plotter can handle it! Global. It is good to know where I am and what lay ahead!

https://www.bandg.com/en-gb/bg/type/chartplotter/bg-zeus3-7-mfdworld-basemap

So the obvious question is whether I can figure out how to boot Squeak on this chart plotter!!! Shizaam!

Honestly, with freely downloadable chart data, I was thinking of combining your weather station (w depth sounder) with a Squeak-based navigation chart plotter capability. Then I learned about my Zeus 3! :-D

Kindly,
Robert
. .. ... ‘...^,^

--
K, r