The XO Computer for Navigation

[agkirk]

Just a note about spare parts for the XO. There is a web site that is advertising parts, including batteries and AC power modules. It is XO Battery [Battery] - $20.00 : XOExplosion.com: , Your home for XO Laptop Add-ons and Accessories.

[phiggins]

Thankyou guys for the suggestions and the parts site. I found an old Thinkpad power adapter and the DC plug on it fitted fairly well, not as good as the original XO but adequate so I cut off the DC plug and hardwired it into the boat's DC , through a fuse of course. I left the XO on overnight and it is still fully charged.

Off on another cruise tomorrow so hopefully all is well with the XO. Have to watch out for that drop off you mentioned Alan (actually I think its a cliff from this direction).

Paul

[darusha]

Well, it's been awhile, but I'm finally posting my AIS update.

It turns out that the problem was the AIS antenna, not the XO or SeaClear. I now have a rubber duckie antenna on the AIS engine, and a perfectly functioning AIS system.

In fact it's so good that I used SeaClear on the XO with GPS and AIS to cross the Columbia River bar in thick fog yesterday. There were several buoys we passed very close to but never saw except on the XO. It's working really well.

Thanks all for the help - the XO is turning into an excellent boat machine. I just installed Airmail today, and have it working with Telnet. I'll be testing with the actual Pactor modem shortly.

[phiggins]

I recent trip I used the XO as my navigation computer running SeaClear under wine on Linux Ubuntu. It seemed I was using a lot less amp hours than I did on trips when I used my PC as the navigation computer.

I decided today to a comparison on the amps used between my new HP 6910p PC and the OLPC XO.

The 6910p PC has:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 2.00GHz,
14" screen,
2GB memory,
80GB 5400RPM hard drive,
and was running XP.

The XO had Ubuntu installed on a 2GB SD card. All the programs and files were also on the card. It had an external wireless keybaord and mouse.

Both had a fully charged battery. I ran the PC from a DC-DC power adapter and the XO directly from my house 12V battery. The only program I ran was SeaClear on both. I used the DR capability of SeaClear to have the boat moving constantly. Both had a wireless connection established.

Here are the results:
The XO was pretty steady at .5amp. If I did some file access it jumped to .7 amps very, very briefly.

The PC with no disc activity used 3.0 amps. If I did file access it jumped to 4.5 amps briefly (but noticably longer than the XO).

So I think I'm saving about 2.5 X 24 = 60 amphours over a 24 hour period.
Cool.

Paul

[skatastrophy]

Originally Posted by phiggins

Here are the results:
The XO was pretty steady at .5amp. If I did some file access it jumped to .7 amps very, very briefly.

The PC with no disc activity used 3.0 amps. If I did file access it jumped to 4.5 amps briefly (but noticably longer than the XO).

So I think I'm saving about 2.5 X 24 = 60 amphours over a 24 hour period.
Cool.

Paul

While that is cool, it's not a fair comparison. The XO was specifically designed to consume very little electricity. Your HP Compaq 6910p is a business laptop that's pretty beefy performance-wise compared to the XO.

On an unrelated note: I just started from the beginning of this thread today. Congratulations on successfully tackling the linux+wine+windows app puzzle. Not many (non computer professional) people would bother and would simply default back to using XP. You're quite the troubleshooter

[RickD]

a quick note here... I don't know much about this particular set up, but I'm betting the linux version is "Ubuntu" which I use on my machines. I have several running XP at home, two running UBuntu linux, a couple with Vista.

Ubuntu (and linux in general) can run a VAST amount of very good software, 90% of which is open source. However, you might find yourself semi-alone on certain things depending on who has delved deeply enough into putting together things for, say, navigation etc.

I have a little USB GPS device I have tried, but not really managed to come up with the right stuff for navigation. (the gps works on windows easily though).

To drew.... about untarring...

Are you logged in as a user account, as root? (You can pm me if you want to take this offline and out of this thread) - Rick

[tyrntlzrdking]

Originally Posted by skatastrophy

While that is cool, it's not a fair comparison. The XO was specifically designed to consume very little electricity. Your HP Compaq 6910p is a business laptop that's pretty beefy performance-wise compared to the XO.

How is it not fair?
Paul is comparing two PC's which he happens to own.
Does the Compaq 6910p use more power than most average laptops?
Which laptops can compare better with the low power consumed by the XO?
I think the entire reason Paul is using the XO is because of its low power consumption, its semi water resistence, and the screens sunlight veiwing.

[skatastrophy]

Originally Posted by tyrntlzrdking

How is it not fair?
Paul is comparing two PC's which he happens to own.
Does the Compaq 6910p use more power than most average laptops?
Which laptops can compare better with the low power consumed by the XO?
I think the entire reason Paul is using the XO is because of its low power consumption, its semi water resistence, and the screens sunlight veiwing.

One notebook was designed for low power usage, the other was designed for office use.

I'm not saying that his findings were disinteresting, simply stating that there are a number of laptops out there designed for low power consumption which would allow a more compatible head-to-head comparison with the OLPC XO.

Of course none of those could compare in price

Originally Posted by RickD

a quick note here... I don't know much about this particular set up, but I'm betting the linux version is "Ubuntu" which I use on my machines.

RedHat developed a new mini-linux distro for OLPC based on Fedora. It's very lightweight compared to Ubuntu/XP/Vista and optimized Mini-linux is usually targeted to old computers and embedded systems for PDAs, cell phones and home appliances. It

[Kerry]

Paul, thanks for the valuable information on power consumption. Do you know if there are any power-management capabilities in the Sugar implementation that might yield further power savings for this application as compared to running it under Ubuntu?
Kerry

[phiggins]

Yes I was just trying to compare the PC I have to the XO to see how much I saving. 60AMP hours is 1.5 hours of running my engine to recharge.

Kerry, sorry but I'm not aware what else you can do on Sugar. Have you measured the amperage used while running Sugar? I would think it would be roughly the same as Ubuntu.

Paul

[phiggins]

I used my XO computer this summer for navigation running SeaClear and my simulator and they both worked very well.

I've had a few requests for the simulator program so I have put a new version (3.1.0) of it on: Navigation Aids

Its quite a bit larger than the previous versions because I now include the chart for the puget sound.

I've tried to make it easier to use and this version works very well in the the non-simualtion mode where it receives real AIS and GPS signals that it feeds to SeaClear and creates TTM messages for my Furuno 1722C radar/chartplotter to give it pseudo AIS. This version also allows me to upload routes as the SeaClear/G7ToWin didn't support my Furuno 1722C.

I've tested the simulator on XP and Linux (Sugar and Ubunto).

Paul

[phiggins]

I've started planning for my next trip south next year. We plan to sail from Toronto to Florida, cross to Cuba, then Mexico and finally on to Rio Dolce in Guatemala.

Since I've decided to use the XO as my main navigation computer running SeaClear II, I needed to get all BSB charts. Thankfully NOAA provides all the BSB charts for the USA. From my last trip I have BSB charts for Cuba but I couldn't find any BSB charts for Central America.

I decided to order the 90% grey paper charts of Central America from Bellingham and scan them. I have an HP scanjet scanner which looks like a picture frame that you can lay on the charts and scan pieces of it until you have the whole chart that you can stitch together with the Arcsoft software that comes with the scanner. You can then save it as .BMP file.

I then used SeaClear running on XP to calibrate the chart. I found this feature of SeaClear very easy to do as compared with another navigation software (Fugawi Marine ENC) that I tried before.

But I ran into a problem when I transferred the .BMP files to the XO running Ubuntu Linux. It was able to load them fine if they were less than 60K bytes but any larger than that caused the SeaClear program simply to disappear. I figured it must have something to do with the memory size, 256 Meg, on the XO.

After reading the SeaClear documentation I discovered you can convert the .BMP files to WCI which I believe is a format used only by SeaClear. It made the files about 10 times smaller but still provided all the detail needed. With these I was able to load the charts on the XO with no problem.

[agkirk]

Paul, Thanks for the update, it is always enjoyable to read about your XO adventures.

[Maren]

Originally Posted by phiggins

Since I've decided to use the XO as my main navigation computer running SeaClear II, I needed to get all BSB charts. Thankfully NOAA provides all the BSB charts for the USA. From my last trip I have BSB charts for Cuba but I couldn't find any BSB charts for Central America.

Paul,

If you had this to do all over again, would you go with an 8gb SD card or one of the larger ones? I know the trend is generally to the "You can't have too much speed or memory", but I wonder how much of the card you use with everything on it. That is, is 8gb (or 4gb or 16bg) the minimal amount needed or is it plenty?

[lsoltero]

Hello All,

So my XO is sitting on a shelf gathering dust. i have no use for it and would love to get rid of it... Make me an offer if you want it.. Any offers will be taken seriously.

Thanks,

--luis



Luis Soltero, Ph.D., MCS
Director of Software Development, CTO
Global Marine Networks, LLC
StarPilot, LLC