2014 NCYC Marks deployed

The Newcastle Yacht Club race marks went on-line today.

Thanks to Dennis, Rod, Dave, and his other brother Dave for making this happen.

Looking good boys!

Spinnaker sheet turning block

With my electronic projects on hold, I've went back to modifying / improving my rigging and sheeting setup by adding a flange + cam cleat to this particular system. This spinnaker turning block has an upper and lower spinnaker  block mounted on each rear quarter of Santeria's transom. There has been so may times where I wished I could cleat off the spinnaker at this block, on a windy day , or single handed, or simply to reduce cordage clutter within the cockpit. With a sprink and a ploink and a rickety pop....well....Bobs your uncle.

Materials:

1 - Stainless steel plate  3/32"
1- Abused cam cleat
1 - Fairlead
1 - Angry driller, but later decided to travel to Home Hardware and buy a Tungsten drill bit for stainless
1 - belt sander flipped upside down in a bench vice to round corners of stainless
1 - form fitted cutting board spacer for cam cleat (thank you dollar store)
2 - 7/32" bolts and nuts to attach the cam cleat to the stainless plate


Thanks to my son Bruin for his nautical tower blocks.

Multiple Bluetooth Endpoints

As mentioned in the last post, one of my winters project was to output the multiplexed NMEA signals from Raspberry PI to 2 different Bluetooth transceivers. Before hooking my Bluetooth creation to the Raspberry PI, I wanted to confirm that this setup would work. All this to share data across android devices using a custom NMEA app.

Last night I tested to see if the custom UART converter design could handle multiple Bluetooth transceivers on the same output circuit. I was worried that splitting 1 NMEA output across 2 Bluetooth devices could result in a depleted signal. Because the length of wire connecting the 2 Bluetooth transceivers is so short (and will be short when installed) I was hoping to see little to no reduction of signal quality going to either Bluetooth transceiver.

From the picture below, you can see the breadboard prototype and the 2 Bluetooth transceivers receiving a split NMEA output. 

Testing showed little to no signal depletion (measuring both volts and amps) after hooking the Bluetooth outputs to a voltmeter and comparing the main signal. The entire system, wind instrument + 2 paired Bluetooth transceivers draws 0.12 Amps, that's a whopping 1.44 Watts! Now I know why my 70 aH battery was still partially charged when mistakenly leaving this system on for 2 weeks.

Next I wired up my wind instrument to the breadboard prototype.

Now realizing that the length/distance of wire from the masthead to the electrical panel on Santeria is about 35 to 40 feet, I went ahead and uncoiled a 35 foot length of speaker wire and connected the data output wire of the wind instrument (to mimic the height of the mast). After connecting the speaker wire to the breadboard, I went ahead and paired 2 different Android devices, one to each Bluetooth transceivers. I turned on the fan to get the wind instrument moving, then started the custom Android app.

The results:

Tablet output:

Phone Output:

Giddie Up!

This should work quite nicely aboard Santeria. This double Bluetooth scenario significantly reduces the amount of redesign effort.

Next.....the Raspberry PI!

Raspberry Pi multiplexer

As mentioned in earlier articles I have created an electronic device that will convert my boats NMEA instrument signals (Wind instrument in my case) to a NMEA bluetooth signal. This in turn pairs and pushes this data to an android device where an android application displays apparent wind speed and apparent wind angle using a tablet or smart phone. This year I would like to add another NMEA based instrument to my boats system, more specifically a Depth, Speed and Temperature sensor. 

As it stands, the electronic device that converts NMEA instrument signal to bluetooth doesn't scale up to a multiple instrument scenario. So I'm proposing a slight modification to the custom UART converter device to accept more NMEA instrument signals.

The Raspberry Pi is a small computing device the size of a credit card. The purpose of this article is to not describe the purpose of the Raspberry Pi but to tell how we propose to use it to multiplex NMEA data and publish it via Bluetooth technology. 

Having more than one NMEA instrument on board has added a requirement to multiplex the different NMEA signals from each NMEA instrument into one Bluetooth output signal. Getting back to the Raspberry PI, the reason why it may be an appropriate device for multiplexing are the GPIO pins on the board. GPIO stands for General Purpose Input Output and can be programmed to accept a number of signal protocols. The one that is most interesting and compatible with my custom electronic device is the UART/TTL protocol. Here is the Raspberry PI Rev 2 pinout:

As you can see in the above diagram, there is one hardcoded UART TXD pin (pin 8) and one UART RXD pin (pin 10) on the board already. With the help of a little little python startup script, any one of the other 8 GPIO pins can be converted to accept UART signals. Why this is significant? Well, it now means that I could use the Raspberry PI, in conjunction with my custom serial to UART converter, to accept and multiplex a number of NMEA signals before pushing them out over bluetooth. I'd rather not have to connect with 2 or more bluetooth transmitters in order to get different NMEA instrument signal data (it just seems like bad design in my opinion). So, something like this:

So this winters project is to:

• Use the Raspberry PI to multiplex 2 or more different NMEA signals
• Output the multiplexed signals from Raspberry PI to 2 different bluetooth adapters (so that more than 1 android device can view this data)
• Update the design of the custom UART converter 
• Find another NMEA instrument for testing and multiplexing signals (GPS, etc...)

Santeria - Gone YouTube

Here is a a little video from all Bart's GoPro footage from 2012 and 2013.

SV Santeria - Newcastle Yacht Club

Encasing the Tablet

While browsing the web I found several iPad and Tablet cases. Only a few of these were:

• hard cased
• waterproof
• mountable
• made for marine environments

The closest unit to my criteria was found here. A little pricey @ 150$

Waterproof sport case

My poor-man mentality led me to an idea to make my own fiberglass hard case. It would lack the luster of these finely finished products however it will be reliable and functional for my purposes.

Here is a diagram of how it will look:

Features:

• Made of fiberglass cloth
• Thin plexiglass layer for viewing tablet display
• waterproof
• tablet side or top loading (haven't decided) into box
• mountable to mast

Construction starts soon! More at 11...

Wind Instrument to Bluetooth - Update

Waiting for one of these USB-TTL programmers to arrive to change the baud rate of the bluetooth device (previously posted here)

Waiting for this programmer to arrive has given me time to complete the beta version of my bluetooth board as seen below based on my breadboard prototype (previously posted here). Parts:

1 - 2" x 3" PCB board

1 - Standalone serial bluetooth transceiver

1 - 4 pin Terminal block

1 - 5 volt regulator

4 - 1 uF Capacitors

1 - Max 232

1 - 8 pin chipset (for max 232)

This will be installed in a dry container and will supply wireless data, via bluetooth, to my android tablet with custom NMEA software