[Matti Airas] hopes that there will be a better electronic platform to make his ship smarter, more connected, and safer. He found that traditional marine electronic products are expensive and not suitable for hacker attacks and repairs. Another problem is the lack of interoperability between generations of equipment from the same supplier and between different brands. This prompted him to design a sailor hat with ESP32-an open source hardware development board dedicated to the ocean.

Applications include various sensors and control interfaces of ships, such as fuel or water level measurement, engine speed, chain length counter, or setting up smart lighting or smart refrigeration control. The board is designed to be used with the traditional NMEA 2000 standard and Signal K. NMEA 2000 is standardized as IEC 61162-3, but it is not open source or free. On the other hand, Signal K is free and open source and can coexist with NMEA 2000.

The marine environment can be very harsh, with extremes in temperature, rain, humidity, condensation, and vibration. Boats, like cars, have a well-known noisy electrical environment. [Marty] pays special attention to noise and surge suppression on the entire ship. Since the on-board DC-DC converter has a rated input voltage of up to 32 V, the board can be used with 12 V or 24 V bus systems. The connection between the circuit board and the outside world needs to be very strong, so it is designed to accept various types of connectors, depending on how strong you want it to be.

Sailor Hat is based on the standard ESP32-WROOM-32 module. Interfaces include CAN bus transceiver, optical coupling input and output, I2C, 1-wire and QWIIC interfaces, USB Micro-B programming connector, and several buttons and LEDs. All ESP32 GPIO pins are terminated on the GPIO header, and the jumper option can disable the termination of the standard interface, but instead route them to the GPIO header as needed. In addition, there is a spacious prototyping area to add additional hardware to the circuit board. The hardware design files are hosted in the project repository on GitHub.

In terms of software, there are several frameworks available, PlatformIO, SensESP, ESPHome and Visual Studio Code are the recommended choices. Or, you can use any widely available SDK for ESP32 platform-Espressif SDK, Arduino Core for ESP32, MicroPython, NodeMCU or Rust.

[Matti]'s NMEA 2000 USB gateway example is a great way to master the hardware assembly and software installation required to build actual projects with Sailor Hat. The board is designed to withstand harsh electrical environments. But its mechanical installation obviously needs to be more careful if it must survive offshore applications. Sailor Hat can be installed in a commonly used plastic waterproof housing of 100x68x50 mm or larger, and the protection level is IP65 or higher. Bulkhead connectors and cable glands also need to be properly rated, and the enclosure may require an IP68 rated vent plug to handle the environmental circulation inside the enclosure.

Build additional points for the Arum level sensor.

For me, the big problem is converting old analog instruments to NMEA format. For twin-engine ship conversion, RPM, pool, temperature, low oil pressure, etc. are very expensive.

Regarding RPM, I recently read that someone uses a standard Dollarstore bicycle computer to provide RPM readings.

The bicycle computer uses a magnet attached to a wheel and a magnet sensor attached to the front fork to sense RPM, which is combined with the wheel diameter to calculate your speed.

The genius decided to glue the magnet to (iirc) his flywheel and made a pleasant thrifty bracket to hold the sensor next to it.

In this case, they used a calculator and conversion formula to restore the speed reading to RPM. Another advantage is that the bicycle computer can also automatically store the "cycle time". In this case, this generates a way to check engine operation. Concise method time.

It should be trivial to make a similar sensor that can be read by a microcontroller, all you have to do is measure how often the magnet passes through the sensor. This will avoid annoying manual speed conversions.

Aliexpress has a sensor converter, the price is about 95 US dollars (dual engine support). It seems to be a relatively cheap way to upgrade legacy systems to N2K.

Link: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001420470241.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.33bd13a0hqjWj1&algo_pvid=cf330ec7-b819-4055-98cf-1176be90ec5e&algo_expid=cf330ec5e&algo_expid=cf330ec5eb819-4055-98cf-1176 0b0a556816194432013054337e887f&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_,searchweb201603_

Score deleted for saying "hack and patch." Is "hacking" different from "patching"? Can't you just say "customized"?

Shouldn't the sailor hat be called "gob"?

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