Ray S.
Thanks for your post - it would probably probably better to set up a new thread for this subject! With apologies to Peter for hijacking his original topic - interesting as it is - to me anyway!
I agree there is a wealth of stuff the rpi could be used for on board and I can see it sweeping the board in the 'yotty' world. Kind of makes a mockery of buying stuff costing thousands.
I'm looking at an ais just using a 'dab' tv dongle, vhf aerial and the rpi.. which again Open Cpn can overlay on its charts... amazing!
Have a search through you tube for related stuff - loads there.
Open Cpn has a very useful facility of being able to show nmea streams that are connected to it - so no need to use Python, though of course it is very useful.
I've attached a screen shot as this morning - it will show my sitting room!
Note the green bars top left that shows a satellite signal being received via the gps puck. No need to bother with hats.
On Deb Jessie you may need to make sure your permissions include 'dialout' - serial connections should be accessible to you then - (/dev/ttyUSB0 - GPSD and associated libraries can be used too if you're using a network - $sudo apt-get install gpsd gpsd-clients, or via synaptic which will also pull the dependencies for you).
Andy
ps I can imagine some saying 'all well and good in your sitting room ...!' But I used this yesterday on the hottest day of the year, winds from very light up to gusting to 30 mph ish (according to the met office) late in the afternoon sailing from Gibralter Point to the N Norfolk coast and back ... 40 ish miles, it so does work!
