> On 2020-09-27, at 6:38 AM, Robert Withers <robert.withers at pm.me> 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; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful Latin Phrases:- Tam exanimis quam tunica nehru fio. = I am as dead as the nehru jacket.