Along with all the work-related stuff (pushing out another Beta release, designing for a new hardware platform, etc), I got a few hours to work on OpenSail. One of my co-workers has taken an interest in this project, and started poking through the Dallas Semiconductor website, looking at the 1-Wire Bus devices.

I suppose I should OpenSail as a project here; somebody might actually read about and do something. I get so tired from work I don't have much time to devote to it, and what time I do manage I want to go sailing instead of egg-heading around with more code. Oh, well, as the song says, I'll sleep when I'm dead.

Just in case anyone reads this, the idea behind OpenSail is to wire up wind instruments, knot/log impeller, electronic compass, a GPS, and perhaps a depth sounder to a computer. Then we write some software to tell the crew, the helmsman, and the tactician (yes, this is for racing) where the boat is and what the wind is doing. Other possibilites include displaying position and situation on a chart display; recording historical data during the trip for later review; and display performance vs. polar plot data, both in real-time and using the historical data.

The real problems aren't the code, but rather the custom hardware we'll have to craft. Sailing hardware is expensive in general, and the manufacturers of the purpose-built sailing stuff don't want the competition. The stuff made for home weather stations and such aren't tough enough, and generally aren't accurate enough either.

So anyhow, I guess I'll go figger out how to add the project here on advogato. Jason and I are going to collect all the info I've gathered and write a requirements/design spec in HTML so I can post it on the web page, then we can link it here.