A while ago my son, who is just starting an engineering degree said "Dad, you should take a look at the Arduino. I'm sure you could use it on your boat."
Curious, I googled 'Arduino' and found an enormous stash of information. The Arduino is essentially a hobbyist microcomputer platform. It is not just a single computer board but comes with a development environment that runs on a PC, Mac etc and has a huge range of add on boards that can provide all sorts of interfaces to the outside world. This makes it a wonderful package for custom monitoring and control applications - just what I was looking for.
I could immediately see a number of applications for a cruising yacht: battery management, engine monitoring, interfacing to the yacht's navigation systems through NMEA 0183 and NMEA 2000 - even remote access through wifi and cellular SMS (text messages).
I studied computer science in the seventies and the Arduino, or more specifically the Atmel ATmega range of micro controller chips that it uses, reminded me of the computers I worked on back then. Relatively simple to program with specific tasks to carry out. The difference of course is that such a computer took up at least a 6' high, 19" rack and cost thousands of pounds, whereas now it fits on a tiny chip costing a few dollars.
The first project I want to work on is a battery monitoring system. My boat Millie, a Bavaria 40 Ocean, which we bought in 2016 has rather limited battery capacity but before deciding on what we need to install and what charging systems are required I would like to have a bit more information about how the present system is working. The first goal of the project will be to measure and record voltage, load and charge currents for the battery bank and log this data to an SD card for later analysis. I hope to add a simple LCD display to show the real time voltage and current and possibly an NMEA interface so I can see the data on my MFD (a Raymarine e97) via the Seatalk ng bus. I will also have some temperature sensors to record the ambient temperature and the temperature of the batteries.
Research online showed that, of course, most of this had been done before. I was particularly inspired by Matt Hamilton's blog which was doing almost exactly the same thing. Matt describes all the steps along the way and his code is available on Github. It's been a great help in getting started and worth a read.
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