Car industry has a lot of tests and specifications that are standardized (for example fuel consumption, safety). Local car magazines may have a bit different way to do the tests, but they are pretty much the same all over the world. Car magazines also have their own standardized tests (for example for handling). In boating, ... Read More "Standardized tests and specifications for boats ..read more

Finland is a country with one of the highest number of boats per capita. There are 1.2 million boats in Finland and only 5.5 million people which means that more than every fifth Finn owns a boat. Reasons Finland is the home of so many boat brands Finland has MANY islands Greece is known for ... Read More "Why does so many boat brands come out of Finland ..read more

Glass cockpit uses electronic instrument displays rather than analog instruments and gauges. While my new dashboard has one analog gauge and some traditional marine instruments (like autopilot control panel), it also has three LCD screens, so it can be considered a hybrid “glass cockpit”. Old dashboard Designing the new dashboard One of the design principles ... Read More "Glass cockpit dashboard for a boat ..read more

Modern cars have a lot of technology. Modern boats have some, but not nearly as much as cars. Below is a comparison of the car and boat tech as of today. Cars Boats and yachts Cruise control Not really, but also not needed as the speed will not vary that much and the exact speed ... Read More "Which of the car tech can be found on boats and yachts ..read more

The process of updating oeSENC charts includes a lot of steps. I have outlined them below. This process applies to OpenCPN 5.2.4. This assumes that you have oeSENC plugin installed on OpenCPN and have downloaded the charts already at least once. Most of this applies to first time download too. 1. Go to settings > ... Read More "Updating oeSENC charts on OpenCPN ..read more

Commercial chartplotters are expensive, really expensive. Considering that you can get a 10″ tablet device with better touch screen, faster processor, better responsiveness and much smaller size with a 1/4 of the chart plotter cost, it seems like chartplotters are totally overpriced. I cartel, someone might suspect. That is what I also thought, but then ... Read More "Designing a commercial marine chartplotter – not as easy as it may sound like ..read more

NMEA 2000 (standardized as IEC 61162-3), abbreviated NMEA2k or N2K, is a plug-and-play communications standard, which is used on boats and ships to connect together devices, displays and sensors. The speed of the NMEA 2000 bus is 250 kbit/s and it enables sensors and displays and any other NMEA 2000 compatible devices to “discuss” together. ... Read More "NMEA 2000 PGN’s deciphered ..read more

Inspired by OSCAR Navigation collision avoidance system, I wanted to test how an off-the-shelf Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically deep neural network based object labeling system, would work on maritime collision avoidance application. AI would be responsible for the labeling of the objects and marking their location in the image. If it can be done with ... Read More "Testing Artificial Intelligence (deep neural networks) for maritime collision avoidance ..read more

In this post, I compare the nautical (navigational) charts from the following iOS mobile apps: Navionics Boating app, Garmin ActiveCaptain (using BlueChart g2 charts), 0100100 Merellä and Nautics Sailmate. In addition to those, I have also included oeSENC (vector chart) from o-charts.org and photos of the official TRAFICOM paper charts. The app screenshots are full ... Read More "Nautical chart comparison: mobile apps, oeSENC and paper charts ..read more

The most challenging part of building your own DIY chart plotter or some other marine device with a display, is finding a suitable, and reasonably priced, high brightness, sunlight readable monitor. There is a lot of discussion about it, for example on OpenCPN wiki and on cruisersforum.com. I spend probably north of 100 hours researching ... Read More "Sunlight readable monitors for boating and marine applications ..read more