Tuesday 5 November 2013

Ship Computer V1, Initial Hardware Design

I will be using a Raspberry PI as the heart of the system.
In order to have a working system, we need various readings, and have the corresponding sensors connected to the PI

The compulsory sensors/readings have as follows:

1. Magnetometer (Compass Sensor) for indicating the boat magnetic heading
2. Magnetometer for the mast in order to calculate mast rotation.
3. Existing apparent wind direction indicator, interfaced to Raspberry PI
4. Existing wind speed indicator, interfaced to Raspberry PI
5. GPS unit, for calculating Speed Over Ground (SoG) & Course over Ground (CoG) etc

These measurements would be logged to a database.

Using these measurements, the system would also be able to calculate the following:

1. Apparent wind direction using the mast rotation (the difference of the two magnetometers, one on the boat and the other on the mast) and the data from the apparent wind direction indicator.

 2. Real Wind Direction and Real Wind Speed using data from GPS (SoG & CoG)

3. Leeway angle (from boat magnetic heading and CoG)

Additional but not critical sensors that can be added in version 1 of the ship computer could be:

1. Barometric Sensor for logging atmospheric pressure
2. 3D accelerometer for logging sea conditions
3. Current Sensor Module, that will be used for logging of battery charging and power consumption.



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